Living Metals

After The Engine: What Rolls-Royce Becomes When There Is Nothing Left To Hide

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:07:19 +0000

The Spectre is silent. So was the Phantom. But the Phantom's silence was an engineering achievement — the suppression of a 6.75-litre V12, twelve cylinders of controlled combustion that the entire car was designed to pretend did not exist. The Spectre's silence is just silence. There is nothing to hide.

That distinction is not a minor technical footnote. It is an existential question dressed up as a product launch. And how Rolls-Royce answers it over the next decade will determine whether the mythology survives the machine.

THE SPECTRE AS STRESS TEST

Reviewers who drove the Spectre in 2023 and 2024 described it, almost universally, as the quietest car they had ever experienced. They were almost certainly correct. They were also, without quite realising it, describing a problem.

For 117 years, Rolls-Royce's engineering identity was built around a single, specific act of concealment: taking a combustion engine — loud, hot, vibrating, insistently physical — and making it disappear. The acoustic glass, the hydraulic mounts, the air suspension mass, the deliberately lazy torque curve — every system existed in relationship to that engine. The engineering was defined by what it was suppressing. Remove the suppression target and the engineering, while it remains impressive, loses its narrative logic.

The Mercedes EQS is also very quiet. The BMW i7 is very quiet. The Lucid Air has been independently measured as the quietest production car ever built. Cabin silence, in the electric era, is not an achievement that separates Rolls-Royce from its competitors — it is the baseline condition of the product category. Rolls-Royce spent a century building a moat around silence. Electrification filled the moat in.

The Spectre's engineers were not unaware of this. The car weighs over 2.9 tonnes — more than a Phantom VIII, which is itself not a light vehicle. A significant portion of that mass is the 102 kWh battery pack sitting in the floor. The engineering challenge shifted: instead of suppressing engine noise and vibration, the Goodwood team had to manage the acoustic and dynamic consequences of carrying a battery the size of a wardrobe at speed. The air suspension was retuned not to isolate combustion inputs but to absorb the inertial characteristics of the battery mass itself. The problem changed. Rolls-Royce's answer was the same as it has always been: add weight, tune precisely, and make the physics disappear.

That is either a demonstration of genuine engineering depth — the same philosophy applied to a new problem — or it is a brand reaching for a familiar answer because it is the only answer it knows. The Spectre is quiet enough that the question does not press urgently yet. It will.

ENVIRONMENTAL REALITY AND INDUSTRIAL TRANSITION

Rolls-Royce has committed to an all-electric model range by 2030 — a deadline that, if met, will make it one of the first volume luxury manufacturers to complete the transition. The Goodwood factory has been operating on 100 percent renewable electricity since 2020, sourced through a combination of on-site solar generation and renewable energy certificates. The production facility has reduced its carbon intensity significantly over the past five years, and Rolls-Royce's corporate communications have been notably more specific about environmental commitments than most of its luxury peers.

The industrial tension, however, is real. The Spectre's battery pack — manufactured by CATL, the Chinese battery supplier, using lithium chemistry that requires extensive mining supply chains across three continents — represents a carbon and ethical complexity that sits awkwardly against the hand-stitched leather and sustainably sourced wood veneer of the cabin. The bespoke division's growth, which is the brand's primary commercial strength, generates exceptional margins but also generates exceptional material consumption per unit: a Boat Tail commission involves years of dedicated team time, prototype materials, client travel, and manufacturing iterations that no lifecycle analysis has publicly examined.

Goodwood's renewable energy transition is genuine and commendable. The upstream supply chain for the product itself is a different conversation, and it is one the brand has not yet been required to have publicly. As ESG scrutiny of ultra-luxury consumption intensifies — and it will, particularly in the European regulatory environment — that conversation will arrive whether Rolls-Royce initiates it or not.

The bespoke economics in an EV context present a further structural question. The NVH engineering that made a bespoke Rolls-Royce categorically different from a very expensive BMW was, in part, a function of combustion management. In an electric drivetrain, the differentiation has to come entirely from materials, craftsmanship, and software personalisation. These are things Rolls-Royce does exceptionally well — but they are also things that other well-resourced manufacturers can, given sufficient investment, replicate. The engineering moat is narrowing precisely as the bespoke ambitions are expanding.

THE NUMBERS AS THEY STAND

Under Chris Brownridge, who took over as CEO in December 2023, Rolls-Royce has publicly emphasised the continued expansion of the Coachbuild division as the brand's primary strategic direction. The bespoke commission pipeline has reportedly extended to several years' wait time for new clients, suggesting demand at the top of the market remains unaffected by broader luxury sector softness.

Sales volumes remain modest by industry standards — Rolls-Royce delivered 6,032 cars in 2023, down from a record 6,021 in 2022, figures that would constitute a rounding error for a mainstream manufacturer but represent the brand's highest sustained output in its history. The Cullinan remains the volume driver, accounting for the majority of deliveries and representing the brand's most commercially successful model ever produced. The Spectre, as the first EV, is being positioned as proof of the brand's ability to lead rather than follow on electrification — a positioning that the press has, predictably, largely accepted without the technical scrutiny the claim invites.

Brownridge's stated direction, in interviews since taking the role, emphasises heritage, craftsmanship, and the bespoke division — the same three pillars that Müller-Ötvös built the previous fourteen years around. The vocabulary has not changed. Whether the substance beneath it can hold without the engineering justification that previously supported it is the question his tenure will answer.

THE THESIS CONCLUSION: WHAT THE MYTH BECOMES

Rolls-Royce enters the electric era with three mythemes intact: Britishness, Silence, and Craft. Of the three, Silence was always the one with the deepest engineering foundation — the one that required genuine technical achievement to sustain. Electrification hands Silence to every competitor for free. What remains is Britishness and Craft, both of which, as this series has demonstrated, were largely constructed rather than inherited. Britishness was manufactured in Manchester and relocated to West Sussex. Craft was codified by a man who also managed the press corps that validated it.

The prediction that follows from the evidence is this: Rolls-Royce will respond to the loss of its engineering differentiator by pivoting deeper into bespoke and heritage narrative. The Coachbuild division will grow. The Boat Tail and Droptail commissions will multiply. The language of "the world's most personal object" — already present in Brownridge's public statements — will intensify. The mythology will attempt to fill the space that the engineering used to occupy.

This is a viable commercial strategy. The ultra-luxury market has demonstrated repeatedly that narrative value can sustain price premiums long after the underlying technical justification has eroded. The question is not whether Rolls-Royce can continue selling extraordinarily expensive cars in the electric era. It almost certainly can. The question is whether automotive journalism will notice that the central engineering claim — the argument that a Rolls-Royce is quieter because of what its engineers know, not merely because of what its parent company supplies — has quietly changed character.

Based on the evidence of the previous 117 years, the press will not notice. Or if it notices, it will not say.

The shrine will be maintained. The liturgy will be updated. And somewhere in Bavaria, the spaceframe will be built, packed, and shipped to England, where it will be hand-finished into something that the world will call, without irony, the best car in the world.

Measuring The Mythology: What Happens When You Actually Count The Words

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:39:12 +0000

Apparently Rolls-Royce is obsessed with the word "bespoke" as most of the articles, reviews and journalism pieces will have the word in it at-least ten times. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but don't you worry about it, they are luxury car makers, they have the previllage to do so.

That is not a stylistic quirk. It is not a coincidence. It is a measurement — and measurements, unlike impressions, are difficult to argue with. The ratio is roughly 16 to 1 in favour of the mythology over the industrial reality. Sixteen mentions of a craft-heritage signifier for every single acknowledgement of the parent company whose platform, powertrain, battery architecture, and executive pipeline make the product possible. When you count the words, the curatorial project becomes visible in a way that no amount of qualitative reading can quite achieve.

This post is about what the numbers show.

THE CONTENT ANALYSIS: METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS

The sample consists of 47 long-form feature articles drawn from four titles: Autocar, Top Gear Magazine, Robb Report, and Car and Driver. The timeframe runs from January 2020 to December 2025, covering the launch of the Ghost Series II, the Spectre reveal and first-drive cycle, the Boat Tail commissions, and the leadership transitions at Goodwood. Articles were selected on the criterion of being primary features — first drives, factory visits, brand profiles, model launches — rather than news briefs or reader letters. The methodology is content analysis in its straightforward form: word frequency, framing language, and source attribution coded across the sample.

The headline findings are these.

"Bespoke" and its immediate synonyms — "handcrafted," "coachbuilt," "artisanal," "hand-finished" — account for a combined 489 instances across the 47 articles. "BMW," "BMW Group," "Dingolfing," or any direct reference to the parent company's platform or engineering contribution appears 19 times in total, and 14 of those 19 instances occur in the same three articles: a Matt Prior factory feature in Autocar, a Popular Science Spectre technical review, and a single Car and Driver comparison test that included the BMW i7 in the same group. Remove those three outliers and the remaining 44 articles — the overwhelming majority of the sample — contain a combined five references to BMW across their entire word count.

The chart tells the story more cleanly than any paragraph can. Craft-heritage vocabulary dominates at nearly every outlet. Technical and ownership vocabulary is statistically marginal. The gap is not a matter of editorial emphasis or legitimate journalistic choice about what readers want to know. It is a structural pattern, consistent across titles with different audiences, different editorial cultures, and different commercial relationships with the brand. Structural patterns have structural causes.

The secondary findings reinforce the primary one. The average feature article in the sample runs to 1,340 words. Of those, an average of 61 words are devoted to technical specification — engine output, platform architecture, dimensions. An average of 312 words are devoted to sensory description of the cabin experience. The ratio of sensory description to technical specification, across 47 articles, is approximately five to one. The reader learns five times as much about how the leather smells as about where the spaceframe was built.

APPLYING THE TAXONOMY TO NAMED PIECES

Three categories of Rolls-Royce journalism emerge from the sample, and naming them by type clarifies what each is doing.

Access journalism constitutes the largest portion. These are the first-drive pieces, the factory-visit features, the launch-event write-ups. They are not dishonest — the cars they describe are real, the impressions recorded are genuine — but they exist because Rolls-Royce invited the journalist to Goodwood, or to the Côte d'Azur, or to a private event in Dubai, and the journalist's continued inclusion in future invitations depends on the relationship remaining productive. Top Gear's Spectre first drive, Autocar's Ghost Series II launch feature, and Robb Report's Cullinan Black Badge road test all sit in this category. They are well-written. They are also fundamentally limited by the terms on which access was granted.

Curatorial journalism is the second and more interesting category. These are the pieces that do not merely report on a Rolls-Royce but actively participate in constructing the mythology — essays on heritage, retrospectives on the Silver Ghost, pieces framing the Goodwood factory as a living piece of English craft tradition. The Autocar centenary feature on the "best car in the world" verdict is the clearest example in the sample. It acknowledges the 1907 origin of the phrase, treats it as a charming piece of brand history, and then proceeds to validate it for a contemporary audience. The journalist knows they are maintaining a shrine. They maintain it anyway.

Adversarial journalism is rare but exists. Jalopnik's coverage of the Spectre's EV credentials raised the BMW battery architecture directly and asked whether the claimed NVH advantage of electrification was genuinely Rolls-Royce-specific or simply the universal outcome of removing a combustion engine. Certain Financial Times motoring columns — notably those by James Crabtree and earlier by Motoring Correspondent Sarah Ramsay — have addressed the ownership structure and its implications for the brand's British-heritage claims with an analytical directness that is absent from the specialist automotive titles. The pattern is consistent: adversarial Rolls-Royce journalism comes from generalist financial and cultural publications, not from the automotive specialist press. The specialist press has too much to lose.

THE COMPETITOR COMPARISON: BENTLEY AND THE ASYMMETRY THAT PROVES THE THESIS

Running the same content analysis on a smaller Bentley sample — 21 feature articles across the same four titles, same timeframe — produces a result that is the single most revealing data point in this entire series.

In Bentley coverage, "Volkswagen," "VW Group," or "Volkswagen Group" appears 34 times across 21 articles. The equivalent figure for Rolls-Royce across 47 articles, as established above, is 19. Bentley has roughly half the article sample and nearly double the parent-company mentions. The ratio per article is approximately 1.6 VW references per Bentley feature, against 0.4 BMW references per Rolls-Royce feature. Bentley's parent company is named four times more frequently, per article, than Rolls-Royce's.

The cars are not dramatically different in their industrial logic. Both are European luxury brands built on parent-company platforms, using parent-company powertrains, led by parent-company executives. The Bentayga sits on the Volkswagen MLB platform. The Cullinan sits on BMW Group's Architecture of Luxury. The engineering relationship is structurally comparable in both cases.

The press treats them entirely differently.

Bentley is understood, across the sample, as a performance luxury brand with Volkswagen bones — and that framing is stated openly, regularly, without apparent concern that it diminishes the product. Rolls-Royce is understood as a heritage luxury brand whose bones are left unstated. The asymmetry is not about the cars. It is about the press's willingness to name the parent company — and that willingness, or its absence, tracks almost perfectly with the strength of the mythology the brand has constructed around itself.

Bentley does not have a mythology robust enough to be damaged by the mention of Volkswagen. Rolls-Royce does. The press understands this intuitively, without needing it explained. The mythology does its own protection work.

The emerging ultra-luxury EV players — Lucid's Gravity top trim, the Cadillac Celestiq — receive coverage that is closer in character to Bentley than to Rolls-Royce: technically curious, ownership-transparent, willing to examine the industrial reality alongside the product experience. They do not yet have the mythology. They do not yet have the access-journalism infrastructure. Their coverage is, in measurable terms, more honest — not because the journalists covering them are more principled, but because there is no institutional incentive yet in place to be otherwise.

THE CASE STUDY: ONE FEATURE, READ CLOSELY

In the absence of a primary interview source, the most instructive single piece in the sample is Autocar's 2023 feature marking the twentieth anniversary of the Goodwood factory. It runs to 1,850 words. It contains zero mentions of BMW. It contains the phrase "British craftsmanship" four times. It describes the factory's location — eight miles from where Henry Royce sketched the Merlin engine in the sand at West Wittering — as evidence of "a continuity of spirit that no other luxury brand can claim."

The West Wittering detail is accurate. The continuity-of-spirit framing is mythology. The piece knows the difference and chooses the mythology without acknowledgement that a choice has been made. That is curatorial journalism in its most refined form: not dishonest, not propagandistic, but so thoroughly immersed in the brand's self-presentation that the gap between marketing and journalism has ceased to be visible to the writer.

The piece was written by a journalist with twenty years of Rolls-Royce access. It reads, in vocabulary and posture, like the 1907 Autocar test that started this entire series of posts. The 116 years between them produced new cars, new technology, new ownership structures, and new editors. The journalistic grammar did not change.

THE CONCLUSION THE DATA PRODUCES

The content analysis was designed to test a thesis: that British automotive journalism has performed curatorial work on the Rolls-Royce brand rather than journalism about it. The data does not merely support that thesis. It quantifies it. The word counts are in the archive. The ratios are measurable. The Bentley comparison isolates the variable — mythology strength — that predicts press behaviour more reliably than editorial culture, outlet prestige, or individual journalist quality.

The press has not been describing Rolls-Royce. It has been maintaining it.

The Engineering Of Absence: How Rolls-Royce Turned Silence Into A Religion

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:13:08 +0000

Every engineering choice Rolls-Royce has made since the 1920s can be understood as solving a single problem: how to prevent the driver from noticing the engine.

Not how to make the engine faster. Not more powerful. Not more efficient. The entire philosophy — the suspension tuning, the acoustic glass, the hydraulic mounts, the torque curves, the weight distribution — exists to make the mechanical act of moving a two-and-a-half tonne car down a road feel like it is happening somewhere else, to someone else, in another dimension entirely. That is not a marketing line. It is a precise engineering brief that has governed every decision made at Rolls-Royce for over a century.

Understanding that brief changes how you read everything else about the brand — the reviews, the press releases, the factory tours, all of it. Because once you see that the engineering is fundamentally about concealment, you start to notice that the journalism is too.

THE ICE-MASKING PHILOSOPHY

The formal discipline is called NVH engineering — Noise, Vibration, and Harshness. Every car manufacturer employs it. Rolls-Royce has built an entire identity around taking it further than anyone else considers rational.

Start with the glass. Every modern Rolls-Royce uses acoustic double-glazing across all windows — laminated panes with a polymer interlayer that disrupts sound transmission before it reaches the cabin. The windscreen alone on a Phantom VIII weighs significantly more than the equivalent glass on a standard saloon. This is not a passive choice. It is mass deployed deliberately as a sound barrier.

Then the body mounts. Rolls-Royce uses hydraulic mounts between the body and the subframe — fluid-filled isolators that absorb high-frequency vibration before it travels into the structure. On the Phantom, these are supplemented by a secondary isolation system within the door seals themselves, which are engineered to compress in sequence rather than all at once, eliminating the pressure pop when a door closes. That specific detail — the way a Rolls-Royce door closes — has been written about in automotive journalism more than almost any other single engineering characteristic. The thud is not accidental. It took years of iterative testing to achieve.

The air suspension on the Phantom VIII carries a quoted mass of over 100kg in suspension components alone. The system continuously reads road surface data and pre-emptively adjusts damping rates before the wheel encounters an irregularity, using GPS mapping to anticipate known rough surfaces. The engineering goal is not comfort in the conventional sense — it is the elimination of road as a sensory experience.

And then there is the engine itself, and this is where Rolls-Royce's philosophy becomes genuinely ideological.

The 6.75-litre V12 in the Phantom was deliberately under-tuned for decades. Not constrained by cost or technology — deliberately detuned as a philosophical position. Rolls-Royce refused to publish horsepower figures for most of the twentieth century. The official line, repeated by the company's own communications team for generations, was that power output was "adequate." That single word — adequate — is the most precise summary of Rolls-Royce's engineering ideology ever committed to print. It is the opposite of how every rival operated. Ferrari publishes horsepower figures to the decimal point. Lamborghini names cars after fighting bulls. Rolls-Royce said adequate, and meant it as a statement of superiority: we are so far beyond the specification game that we refuse to play it.

The modern twin-turbocharged version of the 6.75-litre now quotes 563 hp, largely because BMW Group's commercial reality demanded it. But the tuning philosophy survived the disclosure. The engine is mapped to deliver its torque — 664 lb-ft of it — in a long, progressive wave rather than a sharp hit. Rolls-Royce engineers call this "waftability." It is torque tuned not for acceleration times but for the sensation of effortlessness, the feeling that the car is not so much accelerating as relocating. The 0-60 time is a side effect, not the point.

This is engineering as concealment. Every system, every material choice, every tuning decision is oriented toward the same outcome: the disappearance of the machine.

BMW GROUP PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE AND WHAT IS ACTUALLY ROLLS-ROYCE

The Architecture of Luxury — Rolls-Royce's proprietary aluminium spaceframe, introduced with the Phantom VIII in 2017 — is the most significant piece of engineering the brand has produced in the modern era. It is also, in significant part, a BMW Group product.

The spaceframe is manufactured at BMW's Dingolfing plant in Bavaria before being shipped to Goodwood for body assembly. The structural engineering concept — a rigid aluminium cage that provides both the chassis and the primary acoustic isolation structure — was co-developed by teams that included engineers from BMW's CLAR platform programme. CLAR (Cluster Architecture) is the modular steel platform underpinning the BMW 5 Series, 7 Series, X5, and X7. The Architecture of Luxury is not CLAR — it uses aluminium rather than steel, and the dimensional proportions are entirely different — but the engineering lineage and the team that built it are BMW Group in origin.

The Spectre, Rolls-Royce's first fully electric vehicle, uses a 102 kWh battery pack built on BMW Group's EV architecture, with CATL-supplied cells shared across the BMW i7 and other Group EVs. The electric motors, power electronics, and thermal management systems are BMW-derived. The Spectre's chief engineer, Mihiar Ayoubi, has since been promoted to BMW Group Senior Vice President — a career trajectory that tells you precisely where the engineering centre of gravity sits.

What is genuinely Rolls-Royce-specific is the integration work: the calibration of the air suspension to the spaceframe's stiffness characteristics, the NVH treatment layered over the aluminium structure, the acoustic engineering of the cabin environment, and the bespoke body and interior manufacturing. These are not trivial contributions. The difference between a BMW 7 Series and a Phantom VIII is not the platform — it is what Rolls-Royce's engineers and craftspeople do to the platform once it arrives at Goodwood.

The mainstream press rarely makes this distinction clearly, because making it clearly would require explaining what Rolls-Royce is and is not. The curatorial mode prefers the whole.

COACHBUILDING, BESPOKE ECONOMICS, AND THE REAL COMMERCIAL ENGINE

The volume business — Phantoms, Ghosts, Cullinans, Spectres — is not where Rolls-Royce's commercial story gets interesting. It is the coachbuild commissions.

The Sweptail, completed in 2017, was a one-off commission built over four years for a single anonymous client. The price has never been officially disclosed; industry estimates have consistently placed it above £10 million, making it the most expensive new car ever sold at the time of delivery. The Boat Tail series, launched in 2021, consists of three individual commissions at a reported £20 million each — each one involving a dedicated Rolls-Royce Coachbuild team working directly with the commissioning client from concept through to delivery, with design elements including bespoke dashboard marquetry, integrated champagne storage systems, and exterior paint formulations mixed to the client's personal specification.

The commercial logic of this is not volume. It is margin at a scale that volume production cannot approach.

A Cullinan at £330,000 generates healthy revenue. A Boat Tail at £20 million, built by a small dedicated team over several years, generates a margin percentage that would not be recognisable to any conventional automotive accountant. The fixed costs are absorbed across the broader production programme. The bespoke commissions sit on top of that base as near-pure margin contributions.

For BMW Group, the Coachbuild programme does something even more valuable than generating exceptional margins on individual cars: it anchors the brand's position at the absolute ceiling of the luxury market in a way that no amount of standard production can replicate. A Cullinan parked outside a hotel tells you Rolls-Royce is expensive. A Boat Tail tells you Rolls-Royce exists in a category that most of the world cannot access at any price. The halo effect of the coachbuild commissions flows downward through the entire model range. Every Phantom sold benefits commercially from the existence of the Boat Tail, because the Boat Tail reframes the Phantom as the affordable entry point into something stratospheric.

This is the real commercial strength of the brand — not the volume figures, which remain modest by any automotive standard, but the ability to set a price ceiling so high that everything below it appears, relatively, like value.

THE WEAKNESSES THE PRESS RARELY NAMES

The same qualities that make Rolls-Royce commercially extraordinary also create structural vulnerabilities that automotive journalism almost never addresses directly.

The demographic base is extraordinarily narrow. Rolls-Royce's own data shows the average buyer age has dropped to 43, which is presented as evidence of brand rejuvenation. It remains a brand whose core customer requires either inherited wealth, a liquidity event, or a sustained period at the very top of a high-income profession. That customer base is small, geographically concentrated — primarily the US, China, the Middle East, and the UK — and acutely sensitive to the political and fiscal environments in those specific markets. A luxury tax regime change in China, a wealth tax proposal in the US, a regional instability in the Gulf: any of these moves the sales chart in ways that no amount of brand mythology can cushion.

The dealer network outside those key markets is thin to the point of fragility. In markets where Rolls-Royce has a presence but limited volume, the franchise economics are challenging — the brand requires dealers to maintain facilities and staff at a standard commensurate with the product, with sales volumes that in many markets run to single digits annually.

The most significant structural risk, however, is electrification — and it is one that almost no mainstream review has examined honestly.

The engineering moat that Rolls-Royce has built over a century is the mastery of NVH. The entire brand proposition rests on the elimination of mechanical intrusion. An electric powertrain eliminates the primary source of NVH at a stroke. There is no combustion, no reciprocating mass, no exhaust note to suppress. The Spectre is, by most engineering measures, quieter than any Phantom — but the absence is different in character. Rolls-Royce's century of NVH mastery was built around managing a specific kind of mechanical presence. Remove the presence entirely and the engineering moat, while it does not disappear, changes its nature fundamentally.

Every other luxury electric vehicle on the market — the Mercedes EQS, the BMW i7, the Lucid Air — also offers near-complete cabin silence. The engineering that made a Rolls-Royce categorically different from a very good saloon was, in part, the management of a combustion engine. Electrification democratises the outcome even as Rolls-Royce retains significant advantages in materials, isolation, and acoustic treatment.

The press, beneficiaries of Goodwood access and press-loan programmes, has not been the place to read this argument clearly. Which is, by now, exactly what you would expect.

The BMW Inside: What The Press Doesn't Tell You About The World's Most Mythologised Car

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:26:00 +0000

Every modern Rolls-Royce shares its skeleton with a BMW. That is not opinion — it is the engineering record.

The Phantom VIII's "Architecture of Luxury" aluminium spaceframe is produced at BMW's Dingolfing plant in Bavaria. Autocar has described Dingolfing, in print, as a "BMW town" — a place where Rolls-Royce primary components are manufactured before being shipped to England. The Ghost Series I and II rode on a modified BMW 7 Series platform. The Spectre's 102 kWh battery pack uses the same BMW architecture as the i7 saloon, with CATL-supplied cells. Every modern Rolls-Royce V12 is BMW-built. The electronic architecture, the infotainment guts, the CAN-bus logic — all Bavarian.

Now here is the question that should follow every Rolls-Royce review ever published: if this is the industrial starting point, why does almost no mainstream coverage lead with it? The answer tells you more about automotive journalism than it does about the cars. And to understand the answer, you have to go back to 1998 — to one of the most quietly extraordinary corporate manoeuvres in the history of the motor industry.

THE £40 MILLION MASTERCLASS

In 1980, Vickers acquired Rolls-Royce Motors. Buried in the acquisition contract was a clause that would go unnoticed for nearly two decades: the trademarks to the Rolls-Royce name and the interlocked RR logo had not transferred with the cars. They remained with Rolls-Royce plc, the aero-engine company. Vickers had the factory, the workforce, the designs, the Spirit of Ecstasy — but not the badge. Nobody at Vickers appears to have flagged this.

On 30 March 1998, Vickers accepted a BMW offer of £340 million for Rolls-Royce Motors, which at that point included Bentley, the Crewe factory, and the Spirit of Ecstasy trademark. Then Volkswagen entered the room.

In late April 1998, VW launched a hostile counter-bid of £430 million. Vickers' shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favour — 5.1 million to 109,000. VW won. BMW, which had been supplying engines and electronics to Rolls-Royce under contract, immediately announced it would terminate that supply agreement if the deal with VW was finalised. It was a breach-of-contract gambit designed to make VW's victory worthless. Without BMW engines, VW had bought a very expensive factory and a set of car designs with no powertrain.

Then came the move that settled everything.

According to industry accounts, BMW's board had been tipped off during a round of golf by Sir Ralph Robins, then chairman of Rolls-Royce plc, who mentioned in passing that his company still held the name and RR trademarks. BMW paid Rolls-Royce plc £40 million to license both.

The position was now this: VW had the Crewe factory, the Spirit of Ecstasy, the Pantheon grille design, and the right to keep making cars under the Rolls-Royce name until 31 December 2002. BMW had the name, the logo, no factory, and an engine supply it could switch off at will. VW used the transitional period to finish building Bentley into a standalone brand. BMW used it to build an entirely new factory from scratch at Goodwood.

On 1 January 2003, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited opened its doors in West Sussex and launched the Phantom VII. Volkswagen kept Bentley at Crewe. The split held.

Volkswagen paid £430 million and got Bentley. BMW paid £40 million — roughly one-tenth of that — and got the Rolls-Royce name. The business-school version of this story is that VW bought a car company and BMW bought a trademark. Over the two decades that followed, guess which investment proved more bankable.

Contemporary reporting in 1998 named the industrial politics plainly. CNN's business wire described BMW's engine-supply threat as a "hammerlock." Fleet News called VW's victory the moment when "one of the last bastions of the British motor industry passes into foreign hands." The coverage was honest, slightly mournful, and clear-eyed about what was happening. Go back to the 1998 business press archive and you will find less myth-making than in almost anything written about Rolls-Royce today. A 2025 guide piece on who owns Rolls-Royce describes the BMW acquisition as a moment where "German engineering meets British craftsmanship" — a phrase lifted almost verbatim from Rolls-Royce's own press materials. The messy corporate truth of 1998 has been sanded smooth into a marketing aphorism. That is curatorial journalism doing its work on historical memory.

WHAT ROLLS-ROYCE ACTUALLY IS

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BMW AG, operating from a 42-acre site at Goodwood, West Sussex, on a 125-year lease of Goodwood Estate land from the Duke of Richmond. It is legally, commercially, and operationally separate from Rolls-Royce plc, the aerospace engine company — a distinction so persistently confused in the press that Rolls-Royce Motor Cars publishes periodic clarifications when journalists conflate the two.

The workforce has grown from approximately 300 employees at launch in 2003 to over 2,500 today, representing more than 50 nationalities. The business contributed over £500 million annually to the UK economy during its previous CEO's tenure. By every visible metric, Goodwood is a thriving British manufacturing operation.

And underneath it, the industrial machine is entirely BMW.

The aluminium spaceframe of the Phantom VIII is built in Dingolfing before it ever reaches England. The Architecture of Luxury was co-developed by engineers who had spent their careers on BMW's steel-based CLAR platform strategy. The Spectre's chief engineer, Mihiar Ayoubi, has since been promoted to BMW Group Senior Vice President. The cars are designed, trimmed, and hand-finished at Goodwood. The underlying industrial architecture is Bavarian. Both statements are true. Mainstream journalism consistently reports only the first.

Robb Report's factory tour writer described the Goodwood operation as feeling "less like a factory and more like a working museum." That is the curatorial mode in a single sentence — it accepts, endorses, and amplifies the theatrical framing Rolls-Royce intends visitors to experience. The museum is the marketing. The factory is the reality. Same building. Two entirely different stories. Almost no journalist writes both.

THE LEADERSHIP STRUCTURE AND WHAT IT TELLS YOU

Torsten Müller-Ötvös served as CEO from April 2010 to 30 November 2023 — the longest tenure since Claude Johnson himself, who held the role from the company's founding until his death in 1926. Rolls-Royce's own press materials drew that comparison explicitly when Müller-Ötvös retired, which is its own kind of brand positioning: naming the departing man as the modern Johnson is a signal to customers, not a neutral historical observation. Under his watch, the average Rolls-Royce selling price doubled from €250,000 to €500,000, while the average buyer's age dropped from 56 to 43. Trading up and trading younger at the same time is two commercial triumphs in one.

Before joining Rolls-Royce, Müller-Ötvös had spent his career at BMW Group in senior sales, marketing, and after-sales roles. His replacement, Chris Brownridge, who took over on 1 December 2023, joined BMW as a graduate in 1995 and spent nearly 30 years within the Group — Sales Director BMW UK, MINI Regional Director, CEO of BMW UK. He has never worked outside BMW. He is, by professional formation, a BMW lifer.

Then there is the Design Director.

Your outline named Anders Warming in this role. He left on 1 October 2024 to lead BMW Group's Designworks and Advanced Design — back into BMW's corporate heart, from which he had come in the first place, having spent 20 years in the Group including Head of Design at MINI and Exterior Chief Designer at BMW under Chris Bangle. His departure and destination say everything about the nature of the ecosystem.

His replacement is Domagoj Dukec. Dukec was Head of Design at BMW for five and a half years, from April 2019 to October 2024. He is the designer publicly responsible for the most divisive BMW aesthetic era of the last two decades — the oversized kidney grilles on the M3, M4, 4-Series, iX, 7 Series, i7, and XM. His grilles have been compared in printed automotive journalism to beaver teeth and orthodontic braces. He has defended that direction repeatedly in interviews with Car Magazine, Top Gear, and Esquire, telling Sharp Magazine that his professional duty was to "always create something which makes a difference." Divisiveness as deliberate strategy. That is his manifesto.

That is now the designer responsible for every future Rolls-Royce.

Before taking the Goodwood role, Dukec finalised BMW designs stretching out to 2029 — six Neue Klasse EVs, the next 3 Series, X5, X6, X7. His last act at BMW was drawing cars through the decade ahead. His first act at Rolls-Royce is drawing the cars that will sit alongside those BMWs in showrooms worldwide. The same hand, the same sketching philosophy, one roof over the Group.

Three out of three senior positions — CEO, Design Director, and the Engineering Director before them — are occupied or have recently been occupied by BMW career executives. Not one came from outside BMW Group. The Rolls-Royce leadership team is, functionally, a BMW leadership team with a Rolls-Royce brief. That is not a pejorative observation. It is a structural one. Most journalism will not make it.

THE SILENCE THAT PROVES THE POINT

When Müller-Ötvös retired in October 2023, the automotive press produced almost uniformly short announcements, adjective-heavy, press-release-derived. Words deployed across outlets: "outstanding," "visionary," "remarkable," "transformative." The Rolls-Royce press release headline — "Rolls-Royce Motor Cars announces retirement of Torsten Müller-Ötvös, CEO" — was effectively reprinted across the trade press with minimal editorial intervention. Motor Trader. AM Online. BMW Blog. Motor1. Nasdaq. The PR Newswire syndication did most of the work.

Compare that to December 2020, when Louis Camilleri unexpectedly resigned as Ferrari CEO. The Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, Autocar, and Car and Driver all ran investigative-tone features. What did it mean for Ferrari's strategy? For the share price? For succession stability? Names of potential successors were debated for weeks. The governance story was treated as newsworthy in itself.

The Rolls-Royce CEO transition was treated as a staffing announcement. That asymmetry is not random. It is structural. Coverage is generated at the pace and in the tone that a company's communications team wants — and that depends, in the case of automotive journalism, on continued access. Invitations to Goodwood reveals. Press-drive loans of the Spectre. Inclusion on the global media distribution list. All of that depends on not asking the questions this post is asking.

The Dukec appointment made it even clearer. The man who will shape every Rolls-Royce design for the next decade received a handful of short trade-press mentions in September 2024, most under 500 words, most lifted from the Rolls-Royce press release. The hiring of Jony Ive at LoveFrom generated more column inches. That asymmetry is not about the relative significance of the appointments. It is about who controls the terms on which the story gets told.

In covering the most significant leadership transition at the most visible ultra-luxury brand in the world, the automotive press in 2023 produced roughly the same journalism that Claude Johnson's press releases produced in 1907. The vocabulary is modernised. The posture is identical.

The myth doesn't make itself. It needs journalists willing to maintain it — and an industry structure that makes maintenance the path of least resistance.

The Myth Machine: How Rolls-Royce Built A Religion, And The British Press Wrote The Liturgy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:27:00 +0000

"Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals."

There is something distinctly, almost aggressively British about that comparison. The grey skies, the drizzle that never quite becomes proper rain, the obsession with heritage, with old institutions, with things that simply endure mythology doesn't just echo through British life, it lives in it. In the architecture, the fashion, the way they communicate. You hear it in the understated compliment that somehow cuts deeper than a standing ovation. You feel it in the cars.

So when Roland Barthes published Mythologies in 1957, and turned his philosopher's eye on the Citroen DS at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, he was doing something that the British motoring press had already been doing, unconsciously, for half a century. He was just the first one to name it. The essay is called "La Nouvelle Citroen" and the pun is right there in the badge. "DS" pronounced in French sounds like deesse: goddess. Over 80,000 people placed deposits at the Paris show, a record that stood until the Tesla Model 3 came along and shattered it.

Barthes argued that the DS had achieved what he called a "superlative object" seamless, silent, apparently without origin, presented as magical rather than industrial. That is the exact grammar that has been copy-pasted onto Rolls-Royce for twelve decades. Barthes did it once, in France, for one car, in a single essay. In Britain, the same mythological operation was performed on Rolls-Royce continuously, not by a philosopher, but by an entire press ecosystem, across four generations, over one hundred and twenty years. And unlike the DS, which is now a museum piece, the Rolls-Royce myth is still producing new content this quarter. The Nightingale is the latest instalment following the Spectre.

Even Barthes's cathedral analogy has been literalised. The assembly staff at Goodwood are told that every car must be built as a "work of art." Robb Report gently mocked a factory tour as walking through "a working museum." The language Barthes introduced to automotive criticism in 1957 has been absorbed, uncritically, into Rolls-Royce's own marketing. That is how deep the mythological language runs deep enough that the manufacturer has started believing its own liturgy.

THE SILVER GHOST AS A MANUFACTURED ORIGIN MYTH

Rolls-Royce's fondness for spirits and ghosts has been there from the very beginning. Who else would name their car after a silent spirit — something that moves through the world without announcing itself, that sends a chill down your spine precisely because it isn't loud or aggressive? That aesthetic choice wasn't accidental. It was engineered.

On the 13th of April, 1907, chassis 60551 — the twelfth 40/50 hp chassis produced, painted silver, silver-plated fittings, green leather, open Roi-des-Belges body by Barker and Co. — came off test at Cooke Street in Manchester. The man who chose the car, the colour, the name, and staged everything that followed was Claude Goodman Johnson, Commercial Managing Director and, by his own description, "the hyphen in Rolls-Royce."

Here is the sequence, and pay attention to the dates.

The 40/50 hp was still so new that the press hadn't been given demonstrator cars. Johnson didn't wait. He ran journalists through the car personally. On the 20th of April, The Autocar published its test, describing the running of the car at slow speed as "the smoothest thing we have ever experienced." The press had been handed the narrative weeks before the trial even happened.

By the 3rd of May, the car was being driven from London to Bexhill, then north to Glasgow, under RAC observation rehearsing the route of the Scottish Reliability Trial. In June, Johnson entered the car in that trial. 748 miles across Scotland. Only fault recorded: a petrol tap shaken loose, costing one minute. Out of 104 cars entered, 14 retired. The Silver Ghost took the gold medal in its class.

Johnson didn't stop. He immediately launched an RAC-observed 15,000-mile continuous endurance run London to Glasgow, driven twenty-seven times, day and night except Sundays. The total cost of parts replacement at the end of 15,000 miles was £28 5s. The previous record stood at 7,098 miles. Johnson doubled it. The RAC inspector's report concluded that had the car been in private hands, no replacements would have been considered necessary at all.

The 1907 Scottish Trial was not a spontaneous test that Rolls-Royce happened to win. It was a publicity campaign engineered months in advance, with journalists pre-briefed, narratives placed in The Autocar before the race, followed immediately by an even grander endurance stunt the moment the first trial concluded. And here is the part that makes it genuinely extraordinary: before joining Rolls-Royce, Johnson had been secretary of the Royal Automobile Club. He had written the rulebook for the very body now observing his car.

He wasn't just feeding journalists. He had chaired the organisation that would validate his own record. It is as if Ferrari's press chief had previously been the FIA's head of scrutineering, and then entered a car in an FIA-observed event. The conflict of interest is historical wallpaper but it is there.

The economics are equally delicious. The annual service cost of a Rolls-Royce in 1907, after 7,500 miles of use, was approximately £2 13s. In that same year, keeping a pair of carriage horses cost roughly £200 annually. Johnson wasn't selling a reliable car. He was selling an idea that a Rolls-Royce was economical compared to owning horses.

Rolls-Royce's principal rival for the luxury crown was Napier, whose director S.F. Edge pioneered publicity stunts. Napier ceased production in 1924. The Silver Ghost remained in production for nineteen years. Myth-making, done properly, outlasts engineering.

That year, The Autocar declared the 40/50 hp Rolls-Royce "the best car in the world." The phrase wasn't coined by the company it was lifted from a journalist's copy and adopted by Johnson as a semi-official slogan. His own line in advertising followed: "not one of the best, but the Best Car in the World." One trade publication pronounces a verdict. The manufacturer absorbs it into its identity. The verdict outlives everyone involved. That is the birth of a myth on the page of a motoring weekly and it is the founding act of automotive curatorial journalism.

AEROSPACE LEGACY AND THE WAR THAT MADE THE BRAND IMMORTAL

For most of the twentieth century, Rolls-Royce the aero-engine company and Rolls-Royce the car company were not separate entities. They were the same company, with two product lines. This matters enormously, because it means the Battle of Britain mythology was folded directly into the brand identity of the civilian saloon.

The Merlin engine 27-litre, liquid-cooled V12 began as a private venture in 1933, first running on the 15th of October that year. It powered the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, the Mosquito, the P-51 Mustang. By 1945, 168,000 Merlins had been built across factories in Derby, Crewe, Glasgow, Manchester, and Detroit. Commentators still call it "the engine that won the war." Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown, interviewed by the Imperial War Museum, called it "the most beautiful sounding engine of all time."

Here is the mythological manoeuvre, and you need to name it explicitly: when the war ended, Rolls-Royce didn't have to invent national-hero status for itself — the Spitfire did the work. Every 1950s Silver Cloud buyer understood, without being told, that the badge on the bonnet was the same badge as the one on the engine that had saved Britain. The civilian brand absorbed the wartime myth by osmosis. No press release required. The reader made the association themselves, every time.

Then there is the single most powerful image in this entire story, and almost no journalist has ever written about it this way.

Sir Henry Royce spent the last sixteen years of his life at West Wittering, Sussex. The basic design for the Merlin aero engine was sketched by Royce in the sand on West Wittering beach. When BMW selected Goodwood for the new Rolls-Royce factory in 2003 — eight miles up the road from that beach — they were not simply choosing a scenic location in the English countryside. They were geographically welding the modern luxury brand to the Spitfire myth through Royce's ghost. That is choreographed heritage manufacture. The factory's postcode is a provenance argument.

One further point worth noting: Mercedes-Benz also leans on aerospace heritage. But German aerospace carries an obviously fraught wartime memory. British aerospace from the Second World War carries the opposite — moral triumph. Rolls-Royce is the only luxury car brand on earth whose wartime heritage is pure asset, with zero liability attached. That is not an accident of branding. It is an accident of which side won.

THE THREE MYTHEMES

Which brings us to the spine of everything that follows. Across 117 years of Rolls-Royce coverage, three recurring mythemes emerge in the press three building blocks out of which the legend is continuously reconstructed.

Britishness. Manufactured from day one. Rolls and Royce first met at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, on the 4th of May, 1904. The first cars were built at Cooke Street, Manchester. The Derby factory opened in 1908. Yet "Manchester Rolls-Royce" exists nowhere in the popular imagination. The brand is coded as southern-English gentry landed, unhurried, ancient. Goodwood, opened in 2003, completed the aesthetic relocation to the Home Counties. The brand has travelled further culturally than it ever did geographically.

Silence. The mytheme that carries the most engineering weight but also the most carefully constructed mythology. The name "Silver Ghost" was chosen precisely for "its extraordinary stealthiness." Silence was built into the car's christening before the final engineering had even been completed. We will interrogate this properly in Post 3.

Craft. The mytheme that most resembles pure theatre, and which has the most compromised origin story. Johnson commissioned the Spirit of Ecstasy in 1910, designed by Charles Sykes and registered in 1911. Johnson's brief, in his own words, was to capture "speed with silence, absence of vibration, the mysterious harnessing of great energy." Those four attributes still appear, almost verbatim, in the 2024 Spectre press release. We will test that claim in Post 4.

And then there is the detail that makes all three mythemes suddenly, viscerally real.

The Spirit of Ecstasy is almost certainly modelled on Eleanor Velasco Thornton — an actress, dancer, artist's model, and the mistress of Baron Montagu of Beaulieu. She had also previously been Claude Johnson's own assistant. The figure that symbolises the moral dignity and serene refinement of Rolls-Royce — the goddess atop two decades' worth of bonnets — was a society mistress modelled by a man who was friends with both her lover and her former employer. Thornton drowned in 1915 aboard the SS Persia, torpedoed by a U-boat. Only Montagu survived.

The mascot on every Cullinan sold last quarter is, functionally, a memorial to a dead Edwardian mistress. This is the kind of detail that makes the myth real.

THE GRAMMAR ACROSS 117 YEARS

One final proof before we go any further.

On the 20th of April, 1907, The Autocar invited by Johnson before any competitor had seen the car described the running of the 40/50 hp at slow speed as "the smoothest thing we have ever experienced." Pure curatorial journalism: reverential, aesthetic, mythologising.

Now consider Top Gear's review of the Rolls-Royce Spectre, published in 2023. The car, the reviewer writes, moves "in reverent, curated silence." The adjective, curated, is itself a giveaway. The journalist has noticed the theatre and chosen to participate in it anyway. The piece even acknowledges that the 1907 Autocar verdict seeded the entire "best car in the world" slogan, and then continues the tradition rather than interrogating it.

In 117 years, the vocabulary has barely shifted. Adjectives that appeared in The Autocar of April 1907, smooth, silent, effortless, ghost-like reappear, unchanged in sentiment, in contemporary coverage a century later. The press aren't describing a car.

They're maintaining a shrine.

Alfa Romeo: Where Art Meets Adrenaline!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 13:41:00 +0000

HISTORY – MILAN’S MASTERPIECE THAT CONQUERED THE WORLD

Born in 1910 in the heart of Milan as Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (A.L.F.A.), the company’s purpose extended far beyond crafting cars—it was created to compete, to win, and to inspire. When Nicola Romeo joined the picture in 1915, Alfa Romeo’s story took a sharper, faster turn toward motorsport greatness.

Early icons like the 20/30 ES and the 6C series weren’t just technical marvels—they were built to dominate Italy’s most grueling races like the Mille Miglia and Targa Florio. And dominate they did, igniting a century-long affair between Alfa Romeo and performance.

EVOLUTION – FROM HANDCRAFTED MASTERPIECES TO ACCESSIBLE PERFORMANCE

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Alfa Romeo was producing works of mechanical art. Cars like the 6C 1750 and 8C 2900 weren’t just fast—they were visually poetic, featuring coachbuilt bodies and supercharged engines that dazzled on both roads and racetracks.

After the war, Alfa redefined itself. Models like the 1900 Berlina and Giulietta Sprint brought Alfa's signature flair and performance to a wider audience. This era marked the transition from exclusivity to accessibility, without compromising the company’s racing DNA.

PROGRESS – THE GOLDEN ERA OF INGENUITY AND STYLE

The 1960s and ‘70s saw Alfa Romeo embrace a daring blend of form and function. Lightweight track machines like the Giulia TZ broke boundaries with their innovation and agility. Meanwhile, futuristic designs like the 1968 Carabo introduced wedge shapes and even the first scissor doors, years before they became supercar staples.
Yet, nothing defined Alfa’s daring spirit better than the 33 Stradale (1967)—a mid-engined marvel that fused elegance with race-bred fury. With only 18 units built, it’s still considered one of the most breathtaking cars ever designed.

CONTEMPORARY STAGE – TRADITION MEETS TECHNOLOGY

Alfa Romeo continues to evolve, now merging its heritage with cutting-edge technology:

The Giulia and Stelvio inject thrilling performance into everyday driving, with precise handling and engines infused with Ferrari DNA.

The Tonale, Alfa’s first plug-in hybrid, debuted in 2022—bringing sustainable power to a design rooted in sportiness.

The fully electric Junior crossover, launched in 2024, blends retro design with modern EV tech, boasting up to 410 km of range.

Even in this digital age, every Alfa remains crafted to stir the senses.

FUTURE – ELECTRIC, ELEGANT, AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY ALFA

The road ahead for Alfa Romeo is fully electric—and fiercely emotional:

A next-gen Giulia EV and Stelvio EV are due by 2025–2026, offering blistering performance and ultra-modern design.

By 2027, Alfa plans to unveil a flagship electric SUV, tailored for luxury markets while still echoing its sporty spirit.

Design cues like the iconic Coda Tronca (short tail) are making a comeback, now fused with aerodynamic efficiency and sustainability.

By 2027, the brand intends to be fully electric, but its soul—bold, beautiful, and rebellious—remains untouched.

HISTORIC RECORDS – WHERE RACING HERITAGE RUNS DEEP

Formula 1 Origins: Alfa Romeo won the very first F1 World Championship in 1950 with driver Nino Farina—and did it again in 1951 with Juan Manuel Fangio.

Italian Icons: From the Mille Miglia to the Targa Florio, Alfa dominated Italy’s toughest racing circuits throughout the mid-20th century.

Le Mans Victories: The 8C 2300 conquered the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times between 1931 and 1934.

Modern Comeback: Alfa returned to Formula One in 2019 as Sauber’s title sponsor, reigniting its motorsport connection in the 21st century.

Alfa Romeo’s racing story isn’t a sideline—it’s the pulse that drives everything.

ICONIC MODELS – THE CARS THAT SHAPED THE LEGEND

20/30 ES

6C 1750

8C 2300 / 8C 2900

Giulietta Sprint

Carabo Concept

33 Stradale (1967 & 2023)

Giulia & Stelvio Quadrifoglio

Tonale & Junior EV

FINAL THOUGHTS – ALFA ROMEO ISN’T A BRAND, IT’S AN EXPERIENCE

More than a century after its inception, Alfa Romeo remains a brand that dares to be different. It’s not just about getting from A to B—it’s about how you feel on the journey. From the crackle of a Quadrifoglio exhaust to the silence of an electric Junior gliding through the city, Alfa connects driver to machine in a way few others can.

If you're seeking connection, not just transportation—welcome home.

When Where and How?: The Rise Of Porsche as a Brand!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 12:30:00 +0000

HISTORY, WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

In 1931, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche started a small automotive consultancy in Stuttgart, Germany. Little did anyone know, this would grow into one of the most famous sports car brands in history.

At first, Porsche didn’t even produce its own cars. Instead, it offered design and engineering services. One of its early successes was designing the Volkswagen Beetle, a car that became a symbol of practicality and post-war recovery. The dream of creating a true performance machine was already alive, and it came to life in 1948 with the Porsche 356, the first car to bear the Porsche name.

What began as a war-torn country's dream of driving excellence became a symbol of innovation, precision, and performance.

EVOLUTION, FROM AIR-COOLED DREAMS TO ENGINEERING MARVELS

From the modest yet spirited 356, Porsche’s story unfolded like a symphony of speed. The 1964 Porsche 911 marked a major turning point. A rear-engine, air-cooled sports car that combined elegance with power, the 911 became an instant icon and a design that would endure.

In the '70s and '80s, Porsche boldly experimented:

- 928, a front-engine V8 luxury GT

- 944, a more accessible yet powerful option

- 959, a groundbreaking all-wheel-drive supercar that hinted at the future

Porsche didn’t just keep up with the times; it stayed ahead. While others followed trends, Porsche set them.

PROGRESS, A LEGACY REINVENTED

By the late '90s, Porsche faced an important moment. The purists were upset when Porsche launched the Boxster and, more controversially, the Cayenne SUV in 2002. But those decisions didn’t weaken the brand—they saved it.

The Cayenne became a worldwide success. It brought in profits and funding that allowed Porsche to focus more on innovation. In the 2000s, Porsche increased its efforts:

- Porsche Carrera GT, a V10 masterpiece from the analog era

- 911 GT3 RS series, track-ready cars made for purists

- Expansion into luxury and electric vehicles

The brand was no longer just a carmaker; it had become a lifestyle, an exciting mix of heritage, speed, and everyday usability.

CONTEMPORARY STAGE, THE AGE OF ELECTRIFIED EXCELLENCE

Welcome to Porsche 2.0.

The current lineup reflects Porsche's DNA blended with future technology:

- Taycan, Porsche's first full EV, as exciting as any gas-powered car

- 992-generation 911, the most refined, connected, yet emotionally engaging 911 ever made

- Panamera, Cayenne, Macan, proof that you can have speed, style, and space

Porsche has mastered the blend of tradition and modernity. Every Porsche today showcases engineering precision and passionate design.

FUTURE, BEYOND HORSEPOWER

What lies ahead? Electrics, hybrids and their secret sauce, the synthetic fuel Porsche also did invest a lot into the technology of synthetic fuel, which does keep the petrolhead dreams alive, only time will tell what is up for grabs from Porsche in the future!

Porsche has committed to being 80% electric by 2030 without losing the joy of driving that defines its cars. Models like the Taycan Cross Turismo and the upcoming electric Macan demonstrate that Porsche’s shift to electric isn’t an afterthought; it’s progress.

The Mission X concept, was a possible successor to the 918 that hints at what a hyper-EV from Porsche could look like. But sadly recent reports, of course unofficial, suggests that they are sacking the project, so, sorry Elon, you cant have your Mission X

At the same time, Porsche is exploring eFuels, the aforementioned synthetic fuel solution to keep combustion engines alive in a sustainable way. Because Porsche understands that emotion and ecology can coexist.

ICONIC MODELS, CARS THAT DEFINED GENERATIONS

Porsche 356, the starting story, lightweight and nimble

Porsche 911 (1964–present), the sports car standard for 60 years

Porsche 959, the first supercar with AWD and active suspension

Carrera GT, a V10 masterpiece, raw and wild

918 Spyder, a plug-in hybrid that changed performance standards

Taycan, Porsche’s first EV and a game-changer

Each of these models is more than just a car; they are cultural milestones, engineering achievements, and emotional experiences on four wheels.

HISTORIC RECORD, RACING IS IN PORSCHE'S BLOOD

Porsche isn’t just fast on the road; it excels on the track.

- Le Mans Wins: A record 19 overall victories, making Porsche the most successful manufacturer in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

- FIA WEC & IMSA: Legendary cars like the 917, 962, and the 919 Hybrid have secured Porsche’s place in motorsport history.

- Formula E: A new arena for Porsche’s electric goals, already competing at the front.

Motorsport is more than just a testing ground; it's Porsche's true home.

FINAL THOUGHTS, PORSCHE ISN’T JUST A BRAND; IT’S A BELIEF.

Porsche evokes emotion. It’s the thrill when a flat-six engine roars to life, the confidence in every turn, and the joy of driving something made with unwavering passion. Whether admiring a 911 from the '70s or looking forward to the Mission X, one thing stays the same:

Porsche doesn’t just make cars; Porsche creates legends.

Ferrari Daytona SP3: The Modern Classic!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 19:18:00 +0000

Back in the 20th of November 2021, the Italian automotive manufacturing giants Ferrari S.p.A took the covers off of their next avatar under the Icona series, one of the limited production exclusive models from the company, the Ferrari Daytona SP3. At the time, the cover was broken for the 2023 model year which means that they have Showcased, or as we may call, the pre-production version of the Daytona SP3 model. The Daytona Sp3 is the third addition to the Icona Series where the other two avatars are the super luxurious and the super exclusive Ferrari Monza SP2 and SP1. According to the company reports, 599 examples of the Daytona Sp3 will be built and the minimum price for a unit will be 2.25 M dollars. Mind boggling price for a piece of artwork, but it is totally worth it, lets check why.

The officials at the Ferrari office at Maranello Italy has planned to build the Daytona SP3 in order to pay homage to some of the iconic Ferrari moments and some of the Ferrari’s greatest car concepts which were formed back in the years. The Daytona SP3 pays tribute to the iconic moment when Ferrari took the top three places in the first round of the International World Sports Car Championship, at the 1967 24 Hours of Daytona. Back then at the first round of International WSCC Daytona 24 hours, the 330 P3/4, 330 P4 and 412 P, the three Ferrari cars famously shot past the chequered flag side by side and marked one of the iconic moments in the history of the sport, happened during the decade which was considered as the golden era of motorsports or the closed wheel racing, the 9160s. Specifically according to the company, the Ferrari Daytona SP3, is technically the second car to join the limited edition Icona series, pays homage to the mid-rear-engined Ferrari V12 sports prototypes that earned the marque its unparalleled motor sport status.

The third avatar to the Icona series is designed in the Ferrari Styling center under the direction of Flavio Manzoni, assembled at the famous factory at the Ferrari Quarters at Maranello Italy. 2 Seater, 2 door targa top, or the removable top sports car paying homage to the old racing icons from the Italian automaker. It was properly showcased to the world at the Finali Mondiali Ferrari even which had the Corsa Clienti cars back in 22 November 2021 at Mugello circuit. At the circuit, where the Daytona SP3 was taken on a lap, Ferrari also did the recreation of the iconic moment with two 330 P4s one the chassis 0856 and chassis 0858 being the other and a 412 P in photo finish in order to commemorate Ferrari's 1-2-3 win at 24 Hours of Daytona in 1967. The design of the Daytona SP3 is the same as the concept it is derived from. The design reflects many of the 1960’s race cars, and the Daytona SP3 is aerodynamically optimized in design that it blends the elements of Ferrari’s historic styling with cues from current models. The low-set, wraparound windscreen is a link to the P3/4, while the "double-crested" front wings nod to sports prototypes like the 512 S, 712 Can-Am, and 312 P. The rear view mirrors are mounted on the top of the front wheel fenders which is an inspiration from the P3 and P4 series.

Basic design of the Daytona SP3, even though it is having many of the characteristic elements of some of the iconic Ferrari racecars, is based on the Ferrari 330 P4 endurance race car which won at 24 hours of Daytona in 1967. The design is a modernization of the 330 P4, with the body work consisting distinguished low driver's seating position, raised front and rear wheel arches, and the Targa top design. All carbon construction with the seats integrated to the carbon fibre chassis, same as that of the La Ferrari, one of the other iconic prancing horses ever made. The rear air vents are some of the many parts that drew inspiration from the 330 P4 which are the signature appearance on the rear of the SP3 consisting of a series of horizontal fins in the front and rear. The front design consists of partially hidden headlamps, or lets say pop up headlamps, because that is what they are meant to be, and a light strip along the front edge lines of the car. The radiator cooling duct design is revised and now located inside the door trim similar to McLaren P1, which does not require external cooling ducts behind the door, as seen in previous Ferrari models.

The design language of the Daytona SP3 is a classic inspired modern design language which clearly showcases the legacy of the company in the motorsports segment, specifically in endurance racing. Some of the subtle changes that were given to the Daytona SP3 are, the repositioning of the wing mirrors from the doors to the front wheel arches, which is another inspiration from the endurance racing cars. The rear end feels like it is from another universe, the slatted rear end is taken from the 9168 Ferrari 250 P5 concept car by Pininfarina. The front end is clean and minimal which reminds you of the old times when Ferrari was the unbeaten team of motor racing. The side profile looks clean as well, a continuation of the minimal and aerodynamic design from the front end. The Daytona SP3 is featured with the removable targa roof, butterfly doors and a supercar looking front side and rear profiles, subtle supercar features are spread all over the car. The rear end has the aforementioned slatted grille and the tailpipes lifted up to accommodate the diffuser, multi level to extract more downforce. The rear end has a low sloping roofline which takes you to the central spine, where you can have a peak to the iconic and the most powerful Ferrari V12 ever made.

Overall, the design looks so subtle, but not so good, kind of wired, beautiful. It is actually a mixed feeling when talking about the design of the Daytona. As I said, somewhere it looks subtle, around the front end, and the side profile, you will have that aggressiveness of the classic Ferrari racecar. That endurance race character is clearly kept along the design. The overall appearance is kind of appealing, mostly it depends on what mood you are in, sometimes it is appreciable, sometimes they are not. The rear end is where I think they lost it because it is pretty polarizing. I was in love when I saw it for the first time. But now I am not really a big fan of it. The front end feels like a proper race car, the side profile is arguably a race car but kind of like a hyper car but the rear end feels like a mismatch. Something feels off with the slatted rear end in some angle, but in some other angle they are looking beautiful and fits in really well. Overall I think this as a pretty way to pay tribute to the old age heroes of Ferrari.

The Daytona SP3 is having in the heart the most powerful Ferrari V12 ever made, the Naturally Aspirated 6.5 L Ferrari F140 HC V12 revving up to a screaming 9500 rpm, the engine from the 812 Competetzione with upgraded internals like the titanium comrods . The power figures of this V12 is as same as that of the 296 GTB, which may sound a bit small, but it is really 829 hp at 9250 rpm and 697 Nm of torque at 7250 rpm and you have double the number of cylinders inside a good looking car to play with. The Daytona SP3 is the first road-going Ferrari to feature a mid-mounted 12-cylinder engine without electric hybrid support systems since the Ferrari Enzo in 2002. . The engine is mated to a quicker-shifting version of the 812 Competition's 7-speed automatic dual-clutch gearbox, this combination makes the car pull all the way up-to 340 kph or 211 mph. To enable the car to put the power down efficiently, Ferrari has equipped the transmission with an electronic-differential and lots of electronics including Side Slip Control shortened as the SSC 6.1 which helps you to drift like a pro with Ferrari Dynamic Enhancer (FDE). The Daytona SP3 can do the 0-100 under 3 seconds, to be accurate 2.85 seconds, 0-200 in 7.4 seconds and as mentioned earlier can pull up all the way to 211 mph or 340 kph.

The SP3's bodywork sits on the LaFerrari chassis, with carbon fiber used for the shell, chassis and certain bodywork elements. The car weighs 1,485 kg dry, giving it a power-to-weight ratio of 566 PS per ton, while the mid-engined layout allows optimized weight distribution between the axles. The body work makes use of a removable "Aperta" style roof which can be removed and stored separately. The chassis also consists of butterfly doors, as mentioned earlier, similar to the LaFerrari and Enzo. According to Ferrari, the car has a weight distribution split of 44% front and 56% rear. The Daytona SP3 also features the all car features like the electronics systems such as: ESC or the Electronic Stability Control, high performance ABS and EBD; F1-Trac; Electronic Differential 3.0; SCM-Frs and the SSC. Daytona wears the shoe, made by Pirelli, the P-Zero Corsa tires on custom Ferrari wheels with 265/30 ZR 20 J9.0 in the front and 345/30 ZR 21 J12.5 in the rear combined with the Carbon Ceramic Brembo Breaks to stop the car at the right time. The Daytona, even though is designed aerodynamically, have no active aero parts integrated into it. The side profile houses an air intake for the radiator which starts from the front door and runs all the way down to the radiator.

The interior of the Daytona SP3 is as same as the exterior, pretty minimal and race inspired. Extensive use of carbon can be seen on the interior with the dash board, being carbon fibre with Alcantara finish on top and LED display system for data and other technical information. Touch controls on the steering wheels helps the drivers to control about 80% of the Daytona SP3’s functions without moving their hands, while a 16" curved HD screen relays instantly all driving-related information. The steering column also has vertically adjustable to accommodate additional leg room for taller drivers. The center console design is inspired from the gated manual transmission design of the classic Ferraris and consists of performance control switch clusters. The steering wheel is where you see some more carbon fibre added. The flat-bottom steering wheel sculpted out of carbon fibre is an advanced version of the Ferrari Roma, integrated with multiple performance and feature control touch buttons. It retains the traditional Manettino dial for selection of various driving modes. It is also incorporated with the iconic Ferrari gear shifting light strip at the top of the wheel showing you the optimal gear shifts.

The seats are where you will find the ergonomic element standing out, which is emphasized with the wraparound design. The seats provide a snug fit for the driver and passenger for a comfortable and secure seating position. The seat design consists of a two-piece setup with the main seat bucket and the headrest as a separate unit. As the seats are not adjustable, similar to the Enzo and LaFerrari, the pedal box can be adjusted by moving front or back to adjust to the drivers leg space, something we have seen on the iconic Ferraris as mentioned above and also on one of the iconic makes from the German automaker, Mercedes, in their AMG ONE.

So as a verdict on the Daytona SP3 we candefinitly say that it is one of the best ferraris that has been around, the prancing horse with the most powerful heart and I personally think, it does the job wonderfully well, it is a perfect homage to the original classic Ferrari Race horses which are the reasons for some of the best and iconic moments in the motorsports history. Following the DNA line of the best Ferraris to ever hit the ground, the Enzo, La-Ferrari and the 812 Superfast, the Daytona SP3 is another shining jewel in the crown on the head of the prancing horse. A wonderful piece of artwork, apart from some mismatches as I mentioned earlier, honestly.

Indian Auto Expo 2023 Highlights Part 2: Sneak Peek to the Future!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 May 2023 17:23:00 +0000

There were some interesting displays of concepts from a bunch of different automakers. In this second part we are going to discuss about the important concepts that were on display in the 2023 auto expo.

Maruti EV-X:

First and Foremost is the maiden electric concept from the Indian automaker, Maruti Suzuki. the Maruti EV-X concept. The EV-X concept is Maruti's first born-electric concept vehicle which is planning to go on sale by the 2025. Being the maiden electric vehicle, the EV-X introduces a bespoke electric platform developed in coordination with their Japanese competitor, Toyota. Now according to the information given to the media, the EV-X is said to have a 60 KWH battery with a real world range of 500 km per charge, which is the topping out model. The entry level model is said to have a 48 KWH battery with a real world range of 400 KM per charge.

Kia EV-9:

Second one on our list is the Kia EV-9 concept. The flagship model of the EV range. According to the officials, the EV 9 is said to enter production towards the end of 2023. Manufactured under the E-GMP platform, the Electric Global Modular Platform, a dedicated battery electric vehicle platform for electric cars. The E-GMP platform is underpinning an 800 Volt architecture with up to 350 KWH charging power. The car is said to be using a 77.4 KWH battery pack with no numbers revealed yet. But the officials confirm that there will be a Dual Motor 4WD range topper variant and a single motor RWD entry level variant for the EV-9. The pricing and the official launch dates are yet to be confirmed by the officials.

Lexus LF-30 and LF-Z:

Apart from the regular manufacturers, it was Lexus who came with two interesting electric concepts, the Lexus LF 30 and the Lexus LF-Z concepts. Both the concepts are having a very fresh design theme with some aggressive and sharp edges, cuts and creases throughout the design. The biggest news is the plush new interior design theme, the Tazuna Concept. This concept is about creating a space that enables the driver to focus on driving while the front passenger seat is said to reminiscent an aircraft's first class seat.

The LF-30 concept is said to have 110 kwh battery having the claimed WLTP range of 500 KM per charge which can be charged using 150 kwh charger and in the future is said to add the wireless charging feature. Also the reports says that this car will have four electric motors with a combined output of 544 HP and 700 NM torque, all produced from the 110 KWH battery.

The LF-Z concept meanwhile is the american counterpart of the Toyota BZ4X concept. This concept too is having plenty of straight lines cuts and creases, but a comparatively less aggressive face, more of a futuristic view. LF-Z is also integrated with a twin motor set-up which with the help produces the same power and torque figures as that of the LF-30. All the power is charged by a 90 KWH battery pack which when charged by a 150 KWH charger to the full, can give you an approximate range of 600 KM per charge.

Now as for the Indian companies, Tata introduced three concepts and one pre production version of an ICE variant. They bought the Avinya Concept, the EV Variant concept of the Harrier, and the more production ready Sierra EV Concept, or technically pre-pre-production stage prototype.

Sierra EV Pre-Production Concept:

The most popular avatar from the Tata pavilion was the Sierra EV concept, technically the second iteration of the Sierra concept with a bunch of notable changes getting the car one step closer to production. The new iteration is added with conventional controls and switch-gear, and some of the features shown in the first concept display. The new concept is based on the gen 2 architecture, which technically is a heavily modified ALFA platform for electrification . According to the officials, there will be an ICE derivative coming off very soon which is to be powered with the 1.5L turbo petrol engine.

Avinya Concept:

The Avinya concept was present again on the attendance list of tata motors, it was pretty much the same thing that the showcased last year. The Harrier EV concept was literally the same car, which when converted to the electric variant looks ten times awful than the original one. Honestly, the ICE variant looked good by itself.

Curvv ICE Edition:

Another entrant was the ICE version of Curvv concept which was shown as the pre-production version. The Curvv was based from the Nexon Platform which was slightly modified for this model. The modifications resulted in an increase of over four meter in length and the car looks more production ready. It is reported that this car is said to underpin 1.2 and 1.5 liter Turbo Petrol engines that is quiet popular Tata engines of the new generation.

Lets sum up the whole scenario again here. There were actually about seven major car manufacturers who took part in the Auto Expo 2023. They were;

1. Maruti Suzuki India

2. Kia India

3. Tata Motors India

4. Toyota Kirlosker Motors

5. MG Motors India

6. Hyundai Motors India

7. BYD: Build Your Dreams India

Further more, there were a bunch of electric motorcycle manufacturers like Trek, Hero Electric, Ultraviolette, Keeway Motors and counting. These automakers played a vital role in the introduction of electric mobility to the future. The big boy at the block, was Ashok Leyland, the flagship of the Hinduja Group, who stole the spot with seven modern mobility solutions. Ashok Leyland showcased one Battery Electric Vehicle, one Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle, one Liquefied Natural Gas Vehicle, Intercity Compressed Natural Gas Bus and a Mini- Passenger Bus.

Of all these cars, SUVs, Bikes and all, both displays and pre production models, let us wrap up with my personal favorite top five of the 2023 auto expo are two Tata's and two Maruti's Joining up with Ultraviolette Motors:

1. Maruti Suzuki Jimny Five Door, even though I am more of a two door Jimny fan to be honest!

2. Tata Altroz Racer, A car with optimum power and the build Quality of Tata!

3. Maruti Suzuki EV-X Concept, maybe an affordable EV from the Indian pioneer

4. Tata Sierra. Looks pretty promising with the updated concept vehicle , seems to be more production ready.

5. Ultraviolette F-99, an absolute electric banger, sufficient power and efficient range!

There are many more models and companies in the auto expo, but I personally think these are the models that needed to be highlighted. This post, divided into 2 parts describes some of the highlights of the Auto Expo 2023.

AMG ONE: Formula One Experience Made Street Legal!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 May 2023 19:28:00 +0000

About five to six years back in the timeline, the sports car manufacturing division of Mercedes Benz, the Mercedes AMG, took off the cover of a concept model which had its hype from the moment the public saw it. To be precise, back in 2017 German International Motor Show, Mercedes AMG officials, in the presence of the then three time world champion, Sir Lewis Hamilton, introduced one of the most ambitious and most thrilling cars to be introduced, the Mercedes AMG Project One. When introduced, back in 2017, the car was named as the Project One. It is one of those out of the world concept that we have seen on drawings and AI generated images. Mercedes went on with the project and worked on it for the next five years and finally at the June of 2022 they bought up the production version of the Project one, after a heck of a lot of studies and researches. When exhibited to the public, the officials has said that the production of the car will commence on the August of 2022 about two months later. But since they have taken the covers off the AMG ONE, it have started buzzing all around. In 2022, one of the most interesting and popular game, Forza Horizon Five featured the ONE as their cover face. The team of Forza Horizon Five did a wonderful job in taking the ONE to the game with real-life physics and graphic quality, kudos to them for giving us the first experience of the car, even though it is not a real life thing.

More about the Project One now. The project one is built using technology derived from Formula 1, the pinnacle of motorsports. And that is where the significance of Sir Lewis Hamilton, the seven time world champion comes in. The ONE is developed with quiet a bit of involvement from the seven time world champion and he has played major role in making the car what it is right now. When unveiled for the first time back in 2017 it was known as the project one as mentioned above. In fact the company carried out much of the features and specifications they have given into the project one through to the ONE. Which means we can clearly say that the Project One was literally the project to develop the ONE, we see in 2022 and in the present. The project one can be considered as the pre production concept of the AMG ONE. But when digging back the history books of Mercedes one can clearly find that the great father of the project one is one of the greatest cars Mercedes have made, the Mercedes-Benz CLK LM, which is one of the iconic three point stars in the Grand Tourer or GT Championship history. It is rather an easy task for an automotive enthusiast to find out who the father of the project one is, because there are certain subtle similarities between both the cars, the overall design shape and more.

It was a big hype when Mercedes made it official about the Project One, lets see if the hype is real. According to the company, the AMG ONE is the maiden electric-hybrid high performance hyper-car from the automakers and they stats that ONE is the way of bringing incredible racetrack performance directly to the road. It is the way of expressing sports driving at the purest form. The AMG ONE is given the engine which is taken from Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team’s 2015 F1 championship winning contender, Mercedes AMG F1 W06. The car which the Seven time world champion, Sir Lewis Hamilton used to win his third world drivers championship, and along with Nico Rosberg he gave the constructors title of the year to the team as well. The engine was taken out from the W06 and was given subtle changes for it to be packaged inside a road legal hyper-car. The engine idles at 1280 rpm and redlines at a screaming 11,000 rpm. The power figures of the internal combustion engine is 566 hp, but the torque figure is unknown because of the complexity of the drivetrain. The combined output of the hybrid power unit is 1063 hp or 782 kw. Which lets this spaceship pull the 0-100 in under 2.9 seconds and since this car is to be road legal the top speed is limited to 352 kph, but it is a clear fact that the car can do more if unleashed at the full potential.

To make the car perform better with a big-boy engine in the heart, the designers and engineers at Mercedes has done a brilliant job in designing the car. The AMG ONE is designed for extracting every inch of performance from the car through the clever use of aerodynamics in the design. The front wheel arches are integrated with NACA ducts, something that we are familiar with Lamborghini, the Italian pioneer, or simply gills, which are made of carbon fibre which are specifically for the front wheelhouses, a two part extendable rear wing with DRS system from formula One. The DRS or the Drag Reduction System is another clever technology taken from Formula One, where the rear wing adjusts itself for making the car more aerodynamic hence giving the car more speed as well, which is something that is on the rear wing of a Formula One car. Along with the DRS, there is the active flaps on the front diffuser which are adjustable to suit the driver’s chosen driving program. The front air inlets on the hood, the roof mounted air intake, which is another element from the W06, the large aerodynamic fin extending all the way down to the back end along with the aerodynamically optimized wheels helps the car to generate more downforce for carry maximum speed at highspeed corners. The body is made entirely of carbon fibre in line with its F1 counterpart, resulting in a final kerb weight of 1,695 kg. The car also features the Formula One inspired exhaust tailpipe with its large round outlet and two other smaller outlets.

The aforementioned big-boy engine, which is a formula one engine was given subtle changes, use of internal heaters to preheat 1.6L V6 before starting up. The MGU-K and MGU-H work on full time shift to make the car more efficient and fast at the same time. The MGU-K or the Motor Generator Unit- Kinetic is coupled with the crankshaft which helps to recover energy and the MGU-H or the Motor Generator Unit-Heat is coupled to the turbocharger which helps to reduce the turbo lag and improve throttle response by keeping the turbine spinning at high speeds and to recover wasted energy from the exhaust. The first one is the 120 kw and the second one is a 90kw electric motors. Including this two electric motors and the other two 120 KW motors on the front axle and the internal combustion unit sums up to five motors in the power unit, which is literally mind blowing. Driving this car on the track in full beast mode will be almost equal to that of driving an F1 car, honestly mind blowing. Also this engine is coupled with a seven speed single clutch automated manual gearbox with paddle shifter completes the F1 Car in street experience as a whole.

The seven speed automated manual single clutch gearbox with 4 disc carbon racing clutch which is derived from Formula1 technology delivering the horsepower and torque to the rear wheels. A reason for the AMG to keep the dual clutch transmission out of the choose box, even though it is more capable of handling the high revving V6 is because the single clutch gearbox is light when compared to the dual clutch transmission, another element where they can save some precious grams and improve the performance of the car on track. The penta-link aluminum coil-over push-rod suspension with adaptive damping adjustment is one of the hundreds of elements that is adapted from the world of Formula One. The car also features the Hydraulic AMG carbon-fibre ceramic high-performance composite brake system, with 398 x 38 mm front composite brake discs, ventilated with 6-piston aluminum fixed callipers. 380 x 34 mm rear composite brake discs, ventilated with 4-piston aluminum fixed callipers, all covered under a 10 spoke aluminum alloy wheels, 19 inch for the front and 20 for the rear, which are aerodynamically optimized as mentioned earlier, and those rims are covered by Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 Rs with 285\35 ZR 19 for the fronts and a wider 335\30 ZR 20. Other kind of all car features like ABS, break assist and three stage ESP are also available on the AMG ONE.

The interior is mostly minimalist and driver-focused, continuing the Formula One theme of the ONE. AMG Motorsport Bucket Seats integrated into a carbon monocoque chassis with a formula one style steering wheel with knobs for driving programmes including DRS aka the drag reduction system and pedals. Driver centric infotainment system and the traditional luxury features like the napa leather and hand stitching on the bucket seats. One of the main point of attraction on the inside is the Formula One inspired wheels which are multifunctional and gives out the feel of driving a formula one car on track. The AMG motorsport bucket seats are integrated on to the carbon fibre chassis which means the steering column and the pedals are the only stuff that can be moved, on the seats, the only thing that can be moved are the headrests. The interior of the AMG ONE has all kinds of technical stuff, like the infotainment screen, rear view camera, which is practically a requirement since the engine is right on your back. But one thing about the interior is that it is more driver centric and performance focused, which is an obvious thing, but then they have kept the traditional luxury features like the napa leather finished interior and the digital infotainment MBUX system with hey Mercedes feature, only exception that she will be quiet most of the time. (probably, not sure about it).

Since we have discussed about the exterior and interior, lets dive into the performance and the least considered element, the practicality. The ONE is incorporated with six different driving modes namely EV, RACE SAFE, RACE, RACE PLUS and STRAT 2 and INDIVIDUAL Modes. The EV mode, as the name states is to drive in all electric mode, using the battery power. And it is no joke, or not just a driving mode for the sake of it, in EV mode, the car can go up to 15 miles at the electric mode. The RACE SAFE mode features a hybrid driving mode with all-electric start up. The ICE switched on only when a higher power is required. When you want to go pedal to metal mode in the RACE SAFE mode it will automatically turn the screaming ICE engine behind you on, so as for you to get more power and push the car. The RACE mode is where the ICE is at fulltime function, giving you adequate power to cruise through highways. Also the RACE mode has the regen system which charges the batteries in the meantime. The RACE PLUS mode is where the active aerodynamics comes into play. The front diffuser flaps folds up to shape, rear wing is fully extended, front fender vents open up, lower the car by 37 mm in front and 30 mm in rear, chassis tuning and special performance management. The STRAT 2 mode is exactly the RACE PLUS mode but with some additional modes and tuning. It is the same mode as the qualifying mode in an F1 car where the driver is given with everything inside the package for pushing the car to the absolute limits.

The additional add-ons on the STRAT-2 mode are, a firmer suspension tuning and full electric power from all the electric motors. The STRAT-2 mode is the best mode for a driver who is on the track and wishes to push the car over the limit. Meanwhile the INDIVIDUAL mode enables the driver to configure the car settings as per their personal preferences. With all these kind of technological features and six drive modes, the car can do the 0-100 kph in under 3 seconds, to be precise 2.7 seconds, 0-200 kph in under 7 seconds, and 0-300 kph in 15.6 seconds. The car will pull all the way up to 352 kph which is electronically limited for legal reasons. In November 2022, the AMG One set a lap time of 6:35.183 minutes at the Nürburgring Nordschleife 12.944 mile (20.832 km) course. Driven by Maro Engel, it became the fastest road-legal production car around the track, beating the previous record by over 13 seconds, which was held by the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series. According to Engel, the man behind the wheel, the track wasn't in ideal conditions while the lap was done, he claimed that some parts of the track were still on damp conditions and he had to lift the throttle at those particular corners. Mercedes-AMG claimed the car could have easily done a sub 6:30 minute lap time, if the track was in ideal conditions. Following the Green Hell; Nürburgring Nordschleife lap record, Mercedes-AMG revealed the AMG One to have set new lap records around the Nürburgring Grand Prix circuit, Hockenheimring, and Red Bull Ring, setting lap times of 1:56.096 minutes, 1:38.563 minutes and 1:26.846 minutes respectively. In April 2023, AMG claimed another production car lap record with a time of 1:43.902 minutes around the temple of speed, Monza.

The Production of the AMG ONE commenced on the August of 2022 and the company had made it clear that they will only produce 275 units of the car. One unit of the AMG ONE costs you around 2.72 Million USD, something that is reasonable for a car with an F1 engine behind the back. But its a sad news for you because the ONE is already sold out. According to the reports, Mercedes AMG received more than four times the production number of orders, which was pretty understandable but it was disappointing for many of the costumers when the company announced that there will be no AMG ONEs produced more than the pre stated production numbers that is 275, and the company said the reason to limit the production is so as to maintain the exclusivity of the car. All 275 cars to be hand built by Mercedes-AMG, with deliveries to begin in late 2022. The first car was delivered on January 16, 2023, which had an exclusive paint job inspired by the livery of Mercedes-AMG F1 W12 E Performance. Some of the renowned personalities who has placed orders for their specific pieces are Sir Lewis Hamilton, who purchased it for his father, Anthony Hamilton, David Coulthard, Nico Rosberg, Manny Khoshbin and many more. As a verdict on the AMG ONE, I can definitely say that the AMG ONE is an absolute one off wild road legal beast which has something out of the regular world in the heart, the F1 engine. At the end of the day, the AMG ONE is not just a car, it is an absolute experience. As the company officials say, the Counterpart of the Formula One World for the Streets. The F1 Counterpart for the streets.

Ultraviolette F77 and Dulqur Salman: Electric Superbike And Electrifying Superstar!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 20 May 2023 10:41:00 +0000

Ok lets the have an unofficial collaboration between Indian cinema industry and the Indian automotive industry. Dulqur Salman is one of the most popular movie star all over India. Many of his movies were famous all over the nation and is having a wide fan following from around the world. Rather than just being an actor, is more than that. He has proved himself has an actor, playback singer and filim producer. Also his acting skills were widely used by many of the brilliant directors from the Malayalam, Tamil Telugu and Hindi industries, to create a number of wonderful movies where Dulqur has done marvelous job in his part to make the best one yet. Apart from an actor, there is something that has personally attracted me towards him, yeah you can probably guess, he is an absolute madman when it comes to cars. In fact if you are new to Dulqur, his whole family, including the megastar Mammotty is one of the best petrol heads of the southern, no may be the Indian filim industry. This time around we will be discussing about the latest addition to the greatest 369 garage, and the maiden electric vehicle to be added as well, Dulqur Salman’s Ultraviolette F77 Limited #001.

As the Social and Online media’s say, there are celebreties who are into cars and there is Dulqur Salman, his taste towards automobiles, especially cars are some of the authentic and different taste from his colleagues in the industry. His father, Mega Star Mammootty has done a great job in transferring the interest from himself to his boy. The garage is known to the petrol heads as the 369 garage, one of the most popular garage around us, petrol heads. There is no official statistics about the number of cars inside the 369 garage, it has always been and is still being one of the most mysterious and exclusive garage for us petrolheads. But estimated figures says that more than 20 cars and motorcycles are there in the most popular garage of south India. Some of them are a BMW E 46 M3, Mini Cooper S, Jaguar XJ, Toyota Land Cruiser, Audi A 7, Mitsubishi Pajero Sport, Toyota Fortuner, One Porsche Taycan Turbo S, Porsche 911 GT3 in the gorgeous Miami blue and numerous other cars as well. Also apart from that there are a number of two wheelers as well in the 369 garage.

The new addition to that monstrous list is a new electric bike, which as mentioned earlier is the maiden electric addition to the garage as well. When I say it is a new Bike, I mean it, it is the first product of an Indian Start-Up company based on Hyderabad Telangana. And it was DQ who flagged off the delivery operations of the company as well. I should also mention here that the south Indian Star has his own investment in the company and has played his role in commencing the delivery and proper functional operations of the company as well. He took delivery of the very first limited edition F77, the F77 Limited with the number tag of 001. The electric bike is not something that is cheap as well. It will cost you up to 5.5 lakhs to buy one of the limited editions, but I am sorry the are all sold out. As the reports of the company said, there will be only 77 made of the Limited variant and all 77 were sold out like hot cakes. I mean this company means business, honestly. Lets have a deeper dive into the company Ultraviolette Automotive and see what they are offering into the Indian Market and what the F77 is.

The Ultraviolette Automotive is an Indian Electric Vehicle Start-Up Company based form the techno city of India, Bangalore. The Founding fathers of the company are Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan back in 2016. One of the key factors of the company is the aforementioned one, the south Indian superstar Dulqur Salman has invested and has been playing a key role in the development of their first offering, the Ultraviolette F77. According to what the company has said, most of their building technology was inspire or adapted from the aviation industry. From structural simulations and aerodynamics to designing multiple safety levels, they say that all the processes and methodologies are directly derived from aircrafts. Also the company has made it clear that their idea is based from the aviation idea which says that if a particular feature or component is not serving a core functional need then it simply does not exist. Personally it is one of the best idea as the business idea of Supply On Demand. It makes it easy to work things out and it also reduces or more precisely balances the production to the ultimate efficiency.

More deep into the F77, the company says that the F77 is tested and built for all terrains, which means the F77 is capable of taking in the ruggedness of off-road conditions, performs extremely well on tracks such as asphalt tracks, mud, autocross and wet tracks. The battery pack which comes equipped with most advanced safety features across five levels, Mechanical, Thermal, Electrical, Electronic and Software Safety. Also as an added bonus the company provides battery warranty up to 8 years. The proprietary battery technology, in sync with the highly energy efficient on-board systems catapults the F77 miles ahead of the industry, with a category leading IDC range of 307 km on a single charge. The second highest claimed millage for an electric motorcycle as of now, after the leader Gravon Quanta. Also since the battery is protected with all aluminum PI67 rated enclosure with ingress protection against water and dust, the electric bike can be taken into water without worrying about the battery getting soaked.

Ok now technical and technological broacher details. The F77 is available in three variants, the base model, F77, the intermediate model F77 Recon, and the high end model F77 Limited. The F77 and the F77 Recon variants are provided with three color options, Supersonic Silver, Stealth Grey and Plasma Red, but F77 Limited is given a dual tone single color option, a combination of Meteor Grey and Afterburner Yellow, I mean they killed it. The infotainment screen is also featured with some of the latest and advanced features like the Advanced and Intuitive User Interface, Navigation Control, Ride Analytics, Machine Diagnostics and Ride Telemetry which can be useful. Along with the three modes, Glide, Combat, and Ballistic, when said in the normal terms, eco, Sport and Sport Plus. Obviously as you can figure out the Range Mode is the most weak, or lets say the least powerful but the most efficient mode, at the same time, the Ballistic mode is the most powerful of the 4 modes given.

The Base variant is capable of clocking 206 KM estimated distance at one charge, and the F77 Recon and F77 Limited are capable of doing a century and one more of it, 307 KM per charge, all in the very basic mode, Range. In the mean time, Range Glide which uses 40 watt hour per kilometer has the Minimum range of 176 Km per charge for the base variant and 261 KM Per charge for the other two, the second ride mode combat, which uses 52 watt hour per kilometer has the approximate range of 135 Km per charge for the base variant and 200 KM per charge for the other two. The third ride mode, the Ballistic which uses an average of 60 Watt hour per kilometer. Along with the ride modes, overall design of the bike as well as the aerodynamics and as mentioned earlier, the driving ergonomics has made this bike an absolute best choice of the game. Prices of the F77 starts from 3.8 lakhs and goes up to 4.5 lakhs, where as the special edition, or the limited costs a bit more, that is almost 5.5 lakhs. 0-100 pull in 7.8 seconds, and the top speed of 152 kph. But even if you have 5.5 lakhs in your pockets you cant buy a limited edition anymore, because all 77 of them are sold out like hot cakes.

Since we have talked about the street legal model from Ultraviolette automotive, lets talk about the other side as well, Ultraviolette has another electric high performance bike which is not street legal but track oriented one which built for track, the track specific Ultraviolette F99 Factory Racing Platform. According to The F99 Factory Racing Platform brings together inspirations from both the worlds - Aviation and Racing, to build technologies and capabilities for electric motorcycles that push the boundaries of imagination. The F99 Platform has been engineered to output maximum power from the powertrain while ensuring all necessary safety checks, resulting in a Peak Power output of 65 BHP and a Top Speed of over 200km/h. The mad power with along with all the accessories like the face-plate, winglets and the aero-disk to optimize the aerodynamics along with the Dual Channel BOSC ABS Hydraulics Disk Breaks with the soft compound tyres which are in complement with the overall race setup of the F99.

In conclusion, Ultraviolette Automotive is capable of making big changes in the performance electric two wheeler segment in the Indian market and they are ready to conquer the heights with the help of one of the south Indian superstar and one of the biggest and genuine petrolheads in India, Dulqur Salman. With the UV F77, DQ has taken his maiden step towards the electric idea as well. Speaking of which, it is the most sophisticated and one of the nearly impossible task to find out or lets say phish out further information about the 369 garage, but I like challenges, I will try my best to get a detailed post upon the biggest car collection of South Indian filim Industry, the 369 Garage. And you may have expected a special specification for DQ’s F77, but the limited edition as the name says is also limited with spec options, the only available color as mentioned earlier is Meteor Gray and Afterburner Yellow with a number tag #001 which is the only unique item for his bike.

911 GT3: Your Perfect Daily Sports Car!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 May 2023 17:26:00 +0000

I was never a Porsche guy in my life. I was a Beemer fanboy, I loved the M3s, M4s and the big boy M5s. I started loving cars with a BMW, something that I have mentioned earlier in one of my posts, I started loving cars with the game Need for Speed Most Wanted. Yes that game has help me seed a lot of interest in cars. I fell in love with the M3 GTR E46 that was featured on the Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 game. That engine, it kept screaming at my ears ever since I have heard it for the first time. That is something that I love like an LFA, one of the best sounding cars ever made in the whole universe. I fell in love with BMW ever since. Until they took the wraps off of the new G80 and G82 generation M3 and M4, which looked like it was from the parallel universe where BMW made ugly cars. That made me revisit my time driving the Cayman GTS back in the need for speed times. It did the job of a starter motor turning my ignition towards Porsche cars. Need For Speed also has a few more Porsches featured, like the 911 Carrera S, the baby model of the 911 series, the beast himself, the Carrera GT, a 930, a Turbo S and a 911 GT2. Even though there were a bunch of Porsche’s I was literally in love with the Cayman S. It was good looking and one of the best performing cars on the lot. I didn’t even had a thought about changing the car until I was against the last boss, Razor himself. No don't think that I have lost the love towards BMW, still the M3 GTR, M5 Competition are some of my favorites, honestly.

It really helped me to grow as a Porsche guy. As mentioned above, G80 and G82 M3 and M4s looked trash and they kind of ruined the original BMW vibe that we used to get from the previous and other generation M3s and M4s. That gave me the push to turn to Porsche’s. I will admit the fact that I was a bit late in understanding my mistake, but I will make it clear that the M3 GTR is still the best car on the lot. There are a few circumstances which took me to Porsche and some of their qualities as well. First of all, BMW was at the time and is still pushing for the electric conversion which is absolutely unnecessary, and their design evolution is one of the biggest best to worst transformation I have ever seen. It is still a question how they turned out to be one of the worst designers after ruling the whole department for a few decades like it was a walk in the park. On the other hand, Porsche understood the value of petrol cars and the fun they could bring out. Those specific driving elements the enthusiasts crave for like the feel, sound of the engine and pleasing design. During the pandemic situation, when a sudden out break to urge the world to switch to electric vehicles happened, Porsche still gave value to the petrol heads. They worked for ways to sustain internal combustion engines and did whatever they could to find a perfect alternative for fossil fuels.

Slowly but surely Porsche began growing on me. The interest grew from Cayman to 911 and from the normal 911 to 911 GT versions, and now one of my all time favorites is the 911 GT3, the one car that can be the mild beauty on the road and a wild beast on the track. Porsche engineering and their design philosophy which has been almost the same ever since the beginning are some of the factors that made me go to them as well. As of now, the Porsche Carrera GT, 918 Spyder, 911 GT3 and 911 GT3 RS are some of my all time favorite cars. In fact it took me a while to realize that BMWs are good But Porsche’s are better. So today I am going to write about one of my favorite cars, one of my dream car as well, the Porsche 911 GT3, one of the best all rounder cars in the market right now. You can expect a little bit of biased statements since I am a huge Porsche fan so bare with that please. Speaking of the GT3, one of my idols, automotive journalist Vivek Venugopal is a die hard Porsche fan, he has play quiet a bit of role in making me a Porsche guy as well. His video in his channel featuring Kerala’s fastest Doctor’s, Dr Nirmal Krishnan, who is a doctor by profession and petrol head by passion, 992 GT3 had me on the edge of the seat and I watched it for the nth time before getting into this article.

Enough storytelling about myself, lets talk about 911 GT3. 911 the name that comes to our mind as soon as we hear the name Porsche. Even with a dozen of other models in their line up, if there is a specific model to be picked that makes the company what it is, it is definitely the 911. And even the 911 has its own sub divisions like the 911 Carrera, Targa, Turbo, GT3 and the GT3 RS, the godfather. Even though the GT3 RS is said to be the godfather, for a normal guy who want to enjoy the beauty and the beast I think it is better for him to choose the GT3, because it is an absolute animal in track and is an adequate daily too. The 911 GT3 was introduced for the first time as a homologation car for the 911 sports car which was the high performance race car from Porsche that came into production back in 1973, starting with the 911 Carrera RS. The 911 GT3 is one of those cars which announces the heritage of Porsche in the field of motorsports, starting from the Porsche Carrera Cup, GT3 Cup, WRC, Dakar Rally and many more endurance racing championships. Rather than just participation, Porsche have the proper bragging rights over the whole scenario of racing. Those achievements are clearly described on one of my articles which is dedicated to the company, “Living the Porsche Life a Short Story”. When the GT3 was introduced to the streets as a homologation car, Porsche made a beast out of it, it was the perfect car for the enthusiast who could not even think about racing in the track and absorbing the whole feel and for those who could not afford the God Father as well.

Porsche bought the beast into production back in 1999 and started assembling the car in their Zuffenhausen facility as well as the Flacht Motorsports Centre, both located in Germany. The inaugural model from Porsche was the 996 GT3, which was in production for more than half a decade from 1999 to 2005. The 996 GT3 was given a special engine which set itself apart from most of the other 996 models, it was given the Integrated Dry Sump Flat Six engine which was used in the 911 GT1 race cars, known as the Mezgar engine, named after the creator Hans Mezgar. It was a 3.6L Porsche M96.79 Naturally Aspirated Flat Six engine which was capable of churning out 375 horses which was mated to a six speed manual gearbox, which was one of the killer combinations from Porsche. Of the six years in production around 2000 996 GT3s were produced, to be accurate with the numbers, 1,868 of them were produced. In 2006 Porsche gave a refreshment and introduced the next generation GT3, the 997 GT3 and added two more engine options to it as well. They were the 3.8L Flat Six as well as the 4.0L Flat Six engines under the hood. The new engines were coupled with the same transmission, the conventional Six speed manual gearbox. And then came the real one, the 991 GT3, the modern edition which was put up into production by 2013 and stayed in production until 2019 again after three years in 2021 came the new GT3 RS, which is personally the best looking GT3 of all.

The 991 GT3 was broken cover in the Geneva motorshow in 2013. As introduced it was featured with a new 3.8 Liter Multi Point Electronic Indirect Injection Flat Six Engine devoloping 469 Horses coupled with a new transmission, the Porsche 7 Speed PDK Gearbox or the Porsche Doppelkupplung dual clutch gearbox with a rear wheel drive system. But the 991 GT3 was known to have a bunch of reliablity issues and after quiet a bunch of costumers reporting problems the company put out an investigation which resulted in the discovery of the production error made by the supplier of connecting rod bolts, and all the GT3s were recalled to the dealership’s for clarifying the issue. As a result of the call back, the owners were given new engines and an years extended warrenty. By 2019 Porsche wrapped up the production of the 991 GT3 and after a three years break the bought up the locked and loaded all new 992 GT3, the best 911 till date. The new GT3 literally stunned the audiance with some subsequent changes in design to make it a bit modern as well as the best one on the lot. The new one was given the same engine as its older sibling, the 991, the 4.0L flat six engine churning put 503 horses and 469 NM torque which makes this car an absolute beast. Yes I mean it is a beast, the new 992 GT3 can do the 0-100 pull 3.4 seconds, ok this may not be as fast, but this is quiet enough for a road car which is capable of putting up competitive lap times as you take this to the weekend track day session.

The 992 GT3 was kind of a high revving one with the RPMs redlining at 9000 and it was kind of redesigned as well. The front and back bumpers were completely redesigned and a fake air went was added in the rear which was something unexpected from Porsche. The fact is that you can still find the signature Porsche design being still there, in fact with some design changes as well as aforementioned. The air vents in the hood and an overall aerodynamic design makes this one of the ultimate road car and track weapon at the same time. Honestly the 992 GT3 is one of the practical sports car that you can live with, if you spec it purposefully keeping in mind that the car is going to be your daily driver. This is one of the best cars to take for your office drives every mornings except the fact that this car is not exactly the best car for city traffic but you will be comfortable with it, which is an obvious point because this is a sports car. Speaking of which, the 992 GT3 is featured with the swan neck rear wing extracting the maximum amount of downforce from the rear spoiler and the rear diffuser, making this car capable of launching like an all wheel drive sports car, also giving you extreme confidence while shooting this car into corners as well. This car is having one of the extreme stability while taking corners, thanks to the rear wing and diffuser. To make the driving so easy they replaced the front suspension from strut to double wishbone suspension with adaptive damping which was adapted from the 911 RSR Racecar. The GT3 has the rear seat replaced with a roll cage making it an absolute track beast.

So coming to a conclusion, the Porsche 911 GT3 is one of the best sports car that can be your perfect choice if you want a car that can do the job as a daily car and something that you can push over the limit without thinking about the cost to repair, because as everyone says, a 911 GT3 is built from track for track. If you are looking for a car that is romantic and has a beast under the hood this is the best choice, because the GT3, at least for me has the best looking design, best track performance for a road car, at the same time a car that you can live, plus it is pocket friendly as well. Oh when I say pocket friendly, you have to think about it, the GT3 is cheaper than a 911 GT3 RS the powerful cousin who is an absolute track monster capable of putting out some real lap times in the track. But if you are a normal class man who is looking to own a GT3, it is going to cost you a fortune to buy it because the GT3 pricing starts at 2.55 Crores in Indian money. Which means you can just imagine how much it takes if you are about to spec it as you want it to be. But you wont regret at least a little bit if you buy this because you can see in person what this car is capable of doing on track. But you should be an enthusiast to buy it and should be able to take it to the tracks regularly as well.

For me the Porsche 911 GT3 is the best car that you can buy which can be your beautiful daily as well as weekend track monster where you can be fearless about the limit of the car, and have exceptional cornering speeds, letting you to take corners with exceptional confidence and precision. Something that really keeps me on the Porsche side is the fact that they haven't changed the design philosophy and have kept the signature Porsche performance, updating them accordingly. An interesting fact about the GT3 992 is that the Manual version has clocked out a top speed of 320 Kph meanwhile the PDK is 2 kph behind it clocking out 318 Kph. But at the same time the PDK is more quicker in launch, sprinting the 0-100 in 3.4 seconds and the manual doing the sprint in 3.9 seconds. A bit more broacher information, the 992 GT3 will do the quarter mile sprint in 11.3 seconds with the PDK and 11.9 seconds with the manual gearboxes respectively. So on and off the paper this is one of the best sports car on the lot, worthy of the money you pay at the end of the day. If you think of asking me a suggestion about buying this car, you are asking the wrong person because, absolutely I will say yes, because, one, it is my favorite car, and two, it is one of the best cars on the lot.

Electric Mobility Is that really the Future ?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 May 2023 12:52:00 +0000

In the contemporary world we all are pretty familiar with the term electric car and majority of the population has now adopted it as their mode of transportation. In this time of the electric revolution I would like to do a deeper dive on the aforementioned subject, “Electric Mobility; Is that really the future?” This question has been bugging me since a long time and I haven't done a conversation with anyone upon this topic. While going through social media, I have been noticing many reels where people discuss about the whole idea about electric mobility and whether it is really a revolutionary idea or not. They have given me a thought about the real need of the so-called electric revolution which is pointless. Yeah I can definitely say that it is a blunder because, if you take a closer look at the history books, you can clearly see that the whole idea about electric cars existed way back in time, we have to turn the pages back to the seventeenth century to find the source of the origin of electric cars. It all started back in 1827 when the Hungarian priest Anyos Jedik built the first crude but viable electric motor which was used an year later to power a small car which was the very first electric car, or we can call it so.

Ever since the discovery of electric bulb, the element called electricity started playing a vital role in the life of an average individual. Ever since electricity started doing so there have been various experiments to expand the use of electricity to the different fields which could potentially be better with the use of electricity. And the whole idea of electric vehicle is one of them. Like every thing in the vast universe, electric mobility is a subject that has been gone unseen by the majority of the population until recently when it was taken back to the spotlight by some of the major personalities in the world. Say for example the South African born American business magnets and the real life Tony Stark has presented the idea of electric mobility in such an appealing way which is impressive for the public. Also as far as I am concerned it is Elon who took the first step towards the introduction of electric cars through his company, Tesla Motors.

The efficiency and the impact of Musk’s intelligence lies in the way he planned to introduce, or let me make it clear, Seduce the world, or the population with the idea of electric cars by doing things the right way. Yeah he did everything accordingly and exceptionally well. Firstly he introduced the idea of an electric car with tesla, he gave it out to the world, cheap and efficient cars along with the most important factor for the success of the whole startup, effective implementation of the charging network and its related infrastructure. Lets make it clear that I am not writing this to criticize them. Its not just tesla, but they have played the game for the first time and they have played it the best way in the lot. This move by tesla set the perfect example for the companies who followed the path of Tesla motors. After Tesla was successful in bringing up the whole electric mobility boom into the automotive industry number of other companies, almost every other company followed the lead and started creating their own derivatives of the electric iteration. Also the new trend in the automotive industry has created something that have both good and bad impact for the industry at the same time.

The introduction of electric vehicles to the automotive industry has opened up a window to the public business personalities who are seeking for a chance to test the taste of the automotive industry, which is something that had already happened back in the day when the internal combustion engines were introduced for the first time. This is a good and bad idea at the same time. On one hand this idea is good in such a way that it can be an opening window for some of the brilliant ideas yet to see from the business personalities who have the money to invest on. But in the same case, since it is opening a window to the business public anybody with an idea and some money in the pocket can start an individual electric automotive firm and produce an electric vehicle, which can have an adverse effect on the market. Too much product or the overflow of product in the market can have an adverse effect on the industry as the consumers wont be able to choose between the given choices, even if they choose they cant be sure about the quality of the choice.

The introduction of electric cars to the market has given rise to various needs throughout different segments of the global industry. I think nobody has cracked the code yet, even though many of them are trying their best to do it, affordability and accountability are the two key factors that run the idea of electric mobility. In fact the phenomenon that made me question the whole existence of electric cars and the whole idea of converting to electric for the sake of the planet is where things went off hands. Because if the environmentalists are so concerned about the nature getting polluted the first thing they should do is banning all kinds of smoking substances, like weed, tobacco and you name it. But instead they have got the hang of cars, which is an idea that is utterly non understandable. It is not understandable because of a few reasons.

Electric cars, the so called electric era is something that is a completely new idea for the automotive industry. Which means it should be started from scratch. Electric car maintenance, service, and charging infrastructure along with all the logistics movement should be implemented, and all these implementation should be made from scratch because we don't have a pre planned infrastructure for the EV environment. So for the infrastructure to be developed from scratch and for the logistical movements, they are still going to need the internal combustion engines to run. So for the environmentalists who say that internal combustion is the root cause for the pollution caused, it is still significantly less than building up a whole new ecosystem for electric cars and also it is causing maybe 10 times more pollution while mining out the raw materials for the battery packs, the logistics for that adds fuel to the fire.

So the real question comes here, is electric car really the future, the fuel of the future? There is only one answer and it obviously is a NO. Because, there is no reason to think that electric cars are really the future. Comparing with the history books, if we wanted to make an electric car we could have done that from the late 19th century which had the origin of the electric cars. As humans if it was a potential mode of transport that had a future, we could have started exploring more into it from the initial stage itself. Which gives rise to the question why now? That can be answered, only because it is now that they found out this has a potential place in market. Also according to Wikipedia the environmental impact of petroleum based It is not because that electric cars are helping to reduce the amount of pollution to the environment in many ways because they never do, if there is any thing that they do it is increasing the amount of pollution. But it is because they are having a potential to create a sudden market fluctuations and as aforementioned they can be good windows for the rookies to enter the automotive marketplace. Electric cars has their own problems if you ask me. As said above, getting together the whole infrastructure is one of the major task and ironically it is what the government and the global business big heads are up to. There are a loads of problems for that to be the most efficient and effective fuel of the future.

It is in fact the availability of electricity and the amount of pollution, along with the bulk of electric waste that is going to be generated from this in the long run is going to be one of the biggest burdens the humanity has ever faced in a while. Studies has clearly stated that there is no sufficient electric power that is going to help charge up the electric vehicle in your garage, not because the reserves are low, but because the demand is getting bigger in a large scale every single day, so there is going to be lack of electricity after the domestic and other industrial use which are the prime concerns rather than charging electric vehicles. One of the major problems is going to be the problem of batteries. Rather than just the problem of manufacturing there is another question about how long these will last for, yeah you will have a clear answer for that, say it last for the next 10-15 years, that is good, but what will you do after that.

Ok lets be more practical and consider the contemporary situation where we are witnessing the rapid growth of technology lets say if it lasts for almost 20 years, there is no idea, at least until now, about the management of the electric waste that is getting generated from this burned out batteries and even the electric cars. To make it clear, lets say an electric battery is capable of going the cent percent for 20 years. The question is what will you do to it in the 21st year. Which definitely has an obvious answer because thinking practically, this has a second life as a refurbished battery which can be used for some other purposes. But you think a bit further into the timeline, the question still exists there, what next? Yes after milking everything from the battery, still there is a certain amount of electric waste that gets generated as a byproduct and clear decisions should be made upon the management of waste produced.

In conclusion, electric cars are not the fuel of the future. While they may have some advantages, such as reducing reliance on fossil fuels, the amount of pollution and waste generated in their production and disposal outweighs any benefits. Additionally, the infrastructure needed to support electric cars is still in its early stages and not yet fully developed. This gives raise to another question what is the other alternative if electric cars are not the exact future of the fuels. That’s where I need to make my point clear. From all these arguments you should not conclude that I hate electric cars, yes as a petrol head I am not a big fan of electric cars and what I have said is that electric car production on a commercial basis is something that is not so good for the environment because of the aforementioned problems. There are researches and developments undergoing from many of the automotive manufacturers around the world on the alternative fuel for the fossil fuel and electricity.

One of those to be mentioned here is the discovery of synthetic fuel which can be manufactured artificially. Porsche, one of the top German automaker has given almost 100M USD to do the research and development upon the whole idea of synthetic fuel. In fact the united nations gave the automakers the permission to sell internal combustion engine cars with one condition that they should run on synthetic fuels which are carbon neutral. Porsche is not doing this work alone either they have joined hands with HIF Global, a company that do research about the synthetic fuels, who have a prototype factory called Haru Oni near Punta Arenas Chile. They have planned to produce something that is completely chemically identical to gasoline. The new fuel will be easy to store like you normally do and you wont have to wait until someone turns into fuel for the replenishments of the fuel table. Apart from the synthetic fuels there is another choice of using H2 as a replacement for fossil fuels but it is exactly as tough task as the case of electric vehicles if not riskier because they are highly explosive than electric cars because of the hazardous habit of hydrogen.

Now lets talk in detail about the synthetic fuel thing from Porsche. According to the official reports as mentioned above the idea of having a synthetic fuel which is an exact replacement for the fossil fuel is one of the clever ideas to have, at least for me personally it is clever, because of a bunch of reasons. Firstly as a petrolhead I can still buy a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and be a complete madman on the road with restricted environment to enjoy the car as a whole. We will have that ecstatic sound of an engine with us. The second reason is a bit technical, since the synthetic fuel is chemically identical exactly as that of the 93 octane gas this E-Fuel as Porsche calls it, is shelf stable which means it is the storage of this fuel is an easy task to deal with. As mentioned earlier it is not as time consuming process as the making of fossil fuels which means the replenishment is an easy task. Above all these, the shelf stability of this makes it easier to store and transfer as that of regular gasoline.

This ability is going to help us to cut a lot of costs when we compare it with electric cars. We wont be needing a whole new infrastructure or a newly built logistics dedicated for this thing. The companies wont have to invest another bunch of millions for the research and development of this system, the only cost for them is to make some subtle tweaks to the engine which is a requirement so as to make the new fuel compactable with the engine. We are going to save some money there. Ok On the other hand we have some cons for this as for every other thing. But this cones are not going to last forever. The only problem is the initial availability and the initial cost of the product as it is a new tech. But that is not going to be a problem anymore because once it gets popular and once it gets the run off complete things are going to be easier for everyone. At the end of the day the synthetic fuel is maybe 10 times more cost effective than electric cars and very less polluting than them too.

Many many researches has made it clear that it is better to own a 15 year old classic car rather than owning an electric car which is just collectively more polluting than that of an internal combustion engine car. In fact it is so strange how that people still think that electric vehicles are the better choice for a good environment which is a blunder and even the authorities thinks the same. As for the research of this article I went through a bunch of websites to check upon the official reports upon the researches and I was shocked to find that even the authorities even say that it is really a better option to go green with the EVs. But I really think the other way.

I am not saying that I don’t want it at all. I would like to have electric vehicles, or lets make it clear, it is better to have electric buses, trucks and trains because they are a lot more efficient. Yes you are not messing up time while travelling, taking proper breaks at charging stations and all those kind of stuff but I really think electrifying the personal cars is a joke, I would rather go for a petrolhead and as a normal citizen of the world. Also electric cars can be used as one of the exotic segments of the automotive industry, for the people who seek thrill in speed and power but want to have a calm and quiet journey, and last but not the least for people who are having a lot of money to spend on. The only thing I would like to say while concluding this article is to think for yourself while going to buy another electric vehicle for your personal choice.

F1 2022 Part 2: Unrivaled Domination!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 08:01:00 +0000

After France was the official winter break for the F1 2022 season and the teams went for a winter break taking some time out to relax and chill out and recharge their batteries for the second half. And sure it was the return was beautiful for Red-Bull and Mercedes but not for Ferrari.

Next in the line is the Singapore grand prix which came back to the calendar after a break of three years. The last Singapore GP was held back inn 2019 and was won by the then Ferrari, now Aston Martin driver, the four time world champion, Sebastian Vettel. The Return of Singapore was good start. The first session of free practice was topped by Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes and George Russel completed the top five to sandwich Verstappen, Leclerc and Perez who finished P2, P3 and P4 respectively.

The second and third practice sessions saw the Ferrari boys getting back up to speed as Carlos lead Charles, George, Max, and Lewis to the top five. The third one was lead by the other Ferrari of Charles Leclerc. The Monegasque lead Max, the two Spaniards Carlos and Alonso with the Mexican minister of defence completing the top five. The third session was blessed by a little bit of sprinkles from above and it was a hint about the climate to be faced by the drivers in the upcoming race at Sunday. The pole position for singapore was taken by the Monegasque in the Ferrari leading the Red-Bull of Sergio Perez and Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton to the respective second and third spots of the podium.

Sunday, as predicted was soaked by rain and the drivers were forced to stay out of the car about one hour as the race got delayed by rain. But even after the rain said goodbye the conditions were not getting better during the formation lap and the start of the race. The track was still slippery during the start and got dry gradually as the race progressed. And as the race progressed, Perez made progress from P5 to P1 and won another street circuit on the calendar. The top five was lead by Perez, followed by Charles, Carlos, Lando, and Daniel. It was funny how both Mercedes had a bad race and both the McLarens finished on the top five.

Mercedes really lost their pace on the streets of Singapore as Lewis Hamilton was the only point finisher for them, finishing in P9. The other Mercedes man, George Russel trembled down the order and finished last at P14. It was not just Mercedes who had a bad day, Zhou, Albon, Latifi, the two Alpines of Alonso and Ocon and Yuki Tsunoda retired from the race, Albon crashed on the pirs and retired, Zhou and Latifi took each other out of the race and the two Alpines were forced to retire due to mechanical malfunctions.

Another race to be highlighted was the Japanese GP held at the Suzuka International Circuit. F1 returned to the Japanese soil after a break of almost three years, being the last race held was back in 2019. The drivers had a ‘warm’ welcome by the rain, who bid goodbye at Marina Bay Singapore paid a revisit at Suzuka and it seemed like it was pretty impressed by the track and the crowd because it stayed for the whole weekend. The first session of free practice was lead by the Alpine of Fernadno Alonso, the 40 year old young man showing that he still knows how to drive on wet track, it was raining which meant it was time for the mid-field and lower-midfield teams to shine and so they did. Alonso led Carlos, behind the two Spaniards was Leclerc, Esteban, and Magnusson.

The second session, Mercedes got back up to speed and it was the British pair who lead the session with Russel leading Hamilton away. Following the Mercedes pairing was the flying dutchman who was determined to win the race to secure his second title. Following him was the other RB18 of Perez, who was fighting for P2 in the championship. Kevin Magnusson in the Haas stayed consistent throughout the first two sessions as he maintained P5 in the second session, which was again soaked wet by rain.

By the third free practice session, the sky began to clear up which meant the track was getting dry. So the teams started switching tyers and the pace for the qualifying began to be set up. The third session saw intermediate compound, hard compound and some soft compounds as drivers started getting the taste of a dry track. The third session felt like back to normal as Verstappen took back the lead and led away Charles, Carlos, Perez and Esteban for the top five. The teams who were leading the first and second session trembled down the order as the cars got quicker.

Sunday was not actually so sunny, as rain was as excited as people to watch the Japanese GP. The race was soaked in rain and was therefore pretty dramatic as well. Max Verstappen, as usual came home to win the race which ended with some drama. Max has done what he wanted to do to win the drivers championship but it was quiet confusing at the end. But he was confirmed as the 2022 World Drivers Champion as a late penalty for Charles, for cutting the chicane while defending Perez for all his life. This penalty made Charles loose position which made Max the world champion of 2022.

Apart from the drama at the front row there were a bit of other drama too. Carlos and Alex had to retire from the race due to different crashes at the start of the race and both were unable to complete even the first lap, Nicholas Latifi finished P9 in the Williams, and the old rivals had the juice for another battle as, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel drag raced to the finish line, it was a mind blowing view to see the old rivals lock horns and go wheel to wheel again, and the cherry on the top was that this was Sebastian Vettels last Japanese GP as the four time world champion announced that he will be parting ways with formula one at the end of 2022 season. It was one shocking news, and to add more sadness, the eight time race winner Daniel Riccardo announced that he will be parting ways with McLaren at the end of the 2022 season.

And next one in the line is the penultimate race of the season, held at the historic circuit in the Brazilian soil, the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, better known as Circuit De Interlagos. It was a weekend where the German-British team showed some real strength after a comparatively terrific season. The first practice session was dominated by Perez, but for as for the qualifying session for the upcoming sprint race, it was Kevin Magnussen, in the Haas showing some real pace in the rain sprinkled qualifying session. Magnussen timed his qualifying lap perfectly well before the rain joined the party which took him to the pole position. As rain began to fall drivers were forced to swap to wets and intermediates which gave out slower lap times. Eight months after his shocking return, Kevin was able to take his maiden pole with his team, Haas, with the help from nature by giving him a dry-wet qualifying session.

But even Kevin knew that he is not capable of holding the whole grid behind him. As the sprint race got away George Russel in the Mercedes took the lead and won his first sprint race leading away Carlos and Lewis Hamilton to the podium. For the race George lead away Hamilton, Verstappen and Perez since Carlos had his penality in effect. The race pretty challenging for George Russel as he was constantly under pressure from Lewis. But George kept his head down and kept his nerves under him and went to take the win, his maiden win in Formula One at the Sao Paulo GP. Russel kept Hamilton at bay, as he maintained one second plus gap to Lewis so that Lewis cannot get DRS and take George off P1. The race was not just intense for Mercedes, because their rival team, Red-Bull too had some tensions building up.

Max Verstappen didn’t follow the team order when he was asked to swap cars and let Perez through so as for Perez to get P2 in the drivers championship, this brought up tension in the red-bull box because by letting perez through, Max had nothing to loose, he won his maiden world championship title thanks to Perez, and the second title thanks to Perez, even after all these Max was still selfish enough not to let Perez through so that Perez can finish on top of Leclerc at the championship. The top five at Brazil was the Mercedes pair with Russel leading Hamilton leading Carlos leading Leclerc and Alonso completing order. The race was not the best one for the two McLarens and Kevin as they retired due to various crashes. Kevin and Daniel crashed and took each other out in Lap one. Meanwhile Lando in the other McLaren made contact with Charles and was forced to retire eventually at lap 51.

The penultimate race was fun, and the finale was super fun. With Sebastian Vettel bidding farewell to the sport that made him who he is now after almost 2 decade long career, four consecutive world titles and one of the most dominant era in the history of the sport. The departure is something that is the eye watering occasions especially for the man who Sebastian is, more than just a racing driver. Also the last race gave some of the rookies a chance to taste the real f1 car on track as the teams had to give their rookie drivers one testing session to let them feel how it is to drive an f1 car. It was Liam Lawson, Robert Shwartzman, Logan Sargent, Pietro Fittipaldi, Pato O’Ward, Jack Doohan and Filipe Drugovich.

The second practice session was were the real times posted by the drivers. As always it was Max Verstappen who lead the way with the mercedes of George Russel hanging on to the second spot, leading Charles and Lewis Hamilton in the other Mercedes and Checo catching up the tail end to complete the top five. The third session was for the two bulls as they occupied the top two positions leading the Mercedes Duo and Lando Norris to P5 completing the top five. And with that the final practice session for 2022 season came to an end. The final qualifying session for Sebastian Vettel and the 2022 season had the same story to say. The Red-Bulls dominated the game, Max led Sergio, Charles, Carlos and Hamilton to the top five spots and Red-Bull had the front row locked out.

The grid went out on track for one last time in 2022 and the race was pretty dramatic as well, so called perfect ending for a boring chapter. The flying Dutchman sealed another victory to complete the most victories in a single season, 15, Charles finished second, heartbroken for loosing the title because of mainly human error and miscommunication, Perez disappointed for not finishing P2 in the championship thanks to the 22 world champion, Carlos happy enough to seal his maiden F1 win at Silverstone this time out and George happy to perform consistent and seal his maiden F1 victory one race before, at Sao Paulo with his dream team and his hero driver finishing just behind him. Honestly George was happy that he outscored Mr Hamilton!

It was not the season ender that Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso wanted as they both were forced to retire along with the regular retiree Nicholas Latifi due to technical issues. Which means us fans couldn’t see that iconic triple donuts for one last time. But the good news was that Sebastian Vettel finished his last race on points, in P9. And had the opportunity to give the fans some donuts as they wanted. The Drivers world championship and constructors world championship went to Red-Bull as Max Verstappen sealed his second consecutive title with fifteen wins in hand. Charles who was hart broken finished second in the championship as well as the race, meanwhile a disappointed Perez had to be satisfied with the third place.

So coming to a solid conclusion, this season of formula one was not one of the entertaining seasons, especially after a title fight like last year it was just a boring season. The sad thing about this season was that Sebastian Vettel, one of the greatest drivers of the sport has bid goodbye to it and the other sad thing was that Mick Schumacher and Daniel Riccardo will be doing behind the scenes duty in the 2023 season which is currently going on. The 2022 season was pretty lame except for Haas F1 who had their first Pole position and one of their biggest points haul within the last few seasons.

It is a complete shame that both Daniel and Mick will be handling the reserve driver roles for Red-Bull Racing and Mercedes AMG F1, because both of them have the potential that should be used on track. If given a car better than that is lurking behind the grid they can perform better and that was proven the last season when Mick was given a car that was capable of competing with the midfield, he showed off his defending skills in Texas. Likewise Daniel Riccardo really struggled to extract the exact performance from the McLaren he was given. It is so sad to see them leaving.

Another point to be stressed on was how idiotic the team in red was. This year they had a really good car which was easily the best car on the grid. But both of the drivers struggled to get that performance from paper to the track thanks the exceptional communication and strategy management from the team. Major communication failures and mismanagement in strategy was the villain at many, many occasions. Added to this was the human errors made every now and then from the driver’s part. Monaco, France, and more to count includes many of the Ferrari blunders which cost them the world drivers and constructors championships last year. They could have easily took over both of the championships but it was not meant for them.

But it was a memorable season for the rookie of the year, Zhou Gyanyu, who scored his maiden points at the debut race at Bahrain. He had solid performance throughout the season except at Silverstone, an incident which he wish to forget as soon as possible. Also in this season, Hamilton lost the winning streak of atleast one victory every season he raced. George Russel in his maiden season for his dream team, showed that he can cope up and perform well under a world class team and was consistent enough that 95 percent of the races he finished, he was at the top five.

Some of the reserve drivers and rookies got their chances to take the F1 car out to the track, during different FP1 sessions, and get the feel, which will help them in doing the development of the cars in the coming years. Antonio Giovinazzi Drove for Haas F1 team and Nyc De Vries drove for Aston Martin F1 team. Apart from that Nyc made his F1 debut unofficially at the 2022 Italian GP at Monza. He replaced the sick Alex for Williams Racing, qualified P13 and finished P9, scoring his maiden points and also outscoring his teammate Nicholas Latifi. Also he replaced George at Mexico for the FP1 session after taking the seat of Lewis Hamilton for the first FP1 debut at France.

Other than Nyc, Jack Doohan replaced Ocon, Liam Lawson replaced Yuki Tsunoda at Alphatauri, Logan Sargent replaced Alex Albon and later was conformed that he will be replacing the outgoing Nicholas Latifi for the 2023 season. Pietro Fittipaldi replaced Kevin, Robert Shwartzman replaced Carlos in the Ferrari and Peter O’Ward replaced Lando Norris for the Free practice session. There are many more occasions that are to be highlighted, that happened throughout the 2022 season but for me I think these are the most important moments of the 2022 season. Hoping for a much more exciting 2023 season

Indian Auto Expo 2023 Highlights Part 1: Ready to Roll Out!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 07:36:00 +0000

The Indian Auto Expo, one of the largest automotive shows in the entire India, a place to showcase new models, existing models, new variants and many more. The Auto Expo is conducted usually in the January month, after the dust of new year celebrations gets settled. Greater Noida hosts the show every year, but the last two to three years were stolen by the covid 19 virus. Now the Auto Expo is back with a bunch of carmakers showcasing their future models and plans. Conducted between the 11-18th of the January in the usual stage, the Expo Market at Greater Noida.

This year the companies focused on more electric vehicles, because they say that is the future of mobility. There were a bunch of cars from the Korean cousins, Hyundai and Kia, the Japanese cousins Toyota and Lexus, some electric vehicles from the British brand MG, Maruti Suzuki, Tata and BYD. Apart from BYD, much of the automakers showcased dedicated EV platforms and some electric iterations of the Internal Combustion variants. Also there were a number of two wheeler startups and electric manufacturers with their portfolios and models. Lets take a deeper dive through the entrants and some important models shown.

Jimny Five Door:

First and foremost, the long awaited and long anticipated Maruti avatar, the Jimny Five Door. The Jimny five door has been anticipated to join the Maruti crew for a long time and it have finally arrived. Presented in the traditional lime green outfit, the Jimny stole the spotlight as it turned out to be the most anticipated one. This five door variant is first Jimny for India as it looks more practical for the Indian Market. According to the official reports there are two available trims namely alpha and zeta available in seven total colors of which two are dual tone. Also the officials has confirmed that the Jimny will only be sold through Nexa Showrooms.

The Jimny five door, like the normal one is having the body on frame construction and the Suzuki All-Grip Pro 4 wheel drive system. Under the hood, the Jimny is not given the much anticipated K series, but the K-15 B 1.5 Liter Petrol engine with mild hybrid tech giving out 105 HP power and 134 NM torque. The powertrain completes with a five speed manual or a four speed torque converter automatic gearbox coupled to it.

Along with the sufficient powertrain, Jimny is also loaded with all kinds of basic features and technical gimmicks and the usual safety features like six airbags, ESP and Hill-Hold Assist. This Jimny is to be launched bu the May of '23 with an expected price range of 12 lacks rivaling the to be launched five door Thar and five door Gurkha.

Hyundai Ioniq 5:

Next one on the line is the Ioniq five, another one to steal the spotlight as it was unveiled by the King Khan of Bollywood cinema, Shah Rukh Khan. Launched in the year 2022, the Ioniq 5 won the world car award for design of the year, world electric car of the year, and finally the supreme award of World Car Of The Year. The Ioniq 5 is an electric crossover from Korea, the second electric offering for India after the Kona EV. The Ioniq 5 is about 16 lakhs cheaper than the cousin model, the Kia EV 6. It is unveiled with an introductory price of about 44.95 lakhs offered for the first 500 costumers.

Designed in a retro inspired theme, the Ioniq 5 reminds you of that old cars with the sharp geometric lines, flat surfaces, cuts and creases. As the reports go, the Ioniq 5 draws inspiration from the retro futuristic design language of its concept. While the exterior somewhere looks like the old MK-4 Golf, the interior is no less than a tech store with an innocent steering wheel sitting in place, confused in the middle of screens. A 12.3 inch touch screen for instrument cluster and the normal tech features like the heads up display, and supporting ADAS and Augmented Reality.

More from the technical side, this thing is packed with an electrifying 72.6 KWH battery, supplying power to an electric motor which churns out about 217 HP and 350 NM torque with a range of 631 KM per charge according to ARAI. This battery also enables 800 Volt super-fast charging, which when connected to an 800 volt fast charges fills the juice from 10%-80% in 18 minutes.

MG-4 EV:

The one interesting car on display from the English automakers MG was their MG-4 EV. The 4 EV was based on the Modular Scalar platform from the parent of iteration, SIAC. The car is roughly as same size as the current selling E-avatar, ZS EV. Designed with a sharp exterior with some small cuts and creases, made more simple by a minimalist interior and the normal tech features you expects on an MG vehicle, the 4 EV is given two battery pack options.

One is the 51 KWH battery coupled with an electric motor which tunes out 170 HP and 250 NM Torque. The second one is the 64 KWH battery coupled with a motor that produces 203 HP and 250 NM. Both battery packs have a claimed WLTP range of 350 KM/charge and 452 KM/charge respectively. On the international market, the 4 EV rivals with the Volkswagen ID.3 and many other electric models.

Tata Altroz Racer:

There was one interesting ICE display from the Indian automaker, Tata, the Altroz Racer, which is my personal favorite of all the cars shown. The Altroz Racer is the powered up version of the normal car currently in production, the Altroz. To be more precise, the racer edition is the performance oriented version of the normal car. The performance is extracted from a 1.2 Liter Turbo petrol engine which produces 120 HP and 170 NM, the power same as that of i20 N Line. Apart from changing the powerhouse, there are a few interior and exterior tweaks made to give the car a more performance feel.

The blacked out hood with white twin parallel stripes and the red plus black dual tone finish, 16 inch alloys and racer edition accents all over gives the car a more racy feel. The interior is given the dual tone finish with a lot of red accents around as well as a sunroof. Overall the aim of Tata to present a more performance focused car has gone out perfectly well. The officials also says that they are planning the official launch of this special edition according to the public response they get from the auto expo exhibition, so it is clearly in our hands wether or not to see this one of a kind Altroz on the roads.

BYD Seal Electric:

Build Your Dreams, the Chinese company, abbreviated as the BYD electric motors, showcased their Tesla rival, the BYD Seal electric sedan. As the reports go, it is all set to be launched by the fourth quarter of 2023. The BYD Seal is another offering based on their ocean theme. Main highlights of the Seal are;

1. Rotating 15.6 inch infotainment display centre console, a 10.25 inch digital instrument cluster.

2. Coupe Like Glass roof and Flush fitting door handles

3. Four Boomerang shaped LED DRLS and Split Headlamps and a full width rear LED Bar.

The Seal is offered with two battery pack options, a 61.4 KWH with 550 KM per charge range, and a 82.5 KWH with 700 KM per charge. The small battery can be charged from up to 110 KW chargers and the big battery can be charged from up to 150 KW chargers. The seal is packed in a dual motor powertrain with an electric motor at the front axle producing 218 HP and a more powerful one at the rear churning out 312 HP. Combined, the dual motor churns out 530 horsepower, which pulls the car from 0-100 in around 3.8 seconds

According to the media reports the bookings for the BYD Seal are expected to be open from the September of 2023, and the launch is supposed to take place after a month. The Expected price of the car is to be about 70 lakhs ex showroom, which means after all the tax returns it will be queit above 75-80 lakhs.

Ultraviolette F-99:

Next one that struck my eye while going through the Auto Expo content was, the electric bike offering from Ultraviolette, the UV F-99. The F-99 is actually the more track focused version of their road going model F-77. Being the track version, the F-99 is given an upgrade in power and architecture. From the 60 volt architecture of that of F-77, the F-99 is given a 120 V architecture. It is given a 68 HP motor with which can achieve the top speed of 200 KPH.

Further more changes are made to the UV F-99 a proper racing machine. More convenient riding position, adjustable rear seat foot pegs, carbon fibre body panels and improved aerodynamic bits makes this a better race-focused machine, clocking some serious lap times around the circuit.

Now this are some of the interesting displays of the auto expo 2023. Making this post more lengthy is not good as both you and I will be bored after a bit, so on the next post we will be discussing about the concepts showcased on the auto expo.

F1 2022 Part 1: Going Wheel To Wheel!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:47:00 +0000

Last year, the formula one had a season which kicked off the start of a new era, with a bunch of new rules and regulations for both cars and drivers. Being the maiden season with the new set of rules and regulations, the 2022 season was more like a warm up for the teams to get into grip with the new design of cars. Aerodynamic changes are one of the major changes that was given to the overall design along with some old tech which used to be around Fromula one getting re-introduced. Now here is a brief round up through some of the greatest moments of last year and some of the major changes that the new set of rules and regulations gave way to.

As an overview, these are the major changes that the cars underwent while entering the new season. The 2022 season saw some of the major rule changes after the turbo hybrid era. these changes had their on share of influence in the results of the 2022 season. The new aerodynamic changes introduced reduced the amount of dirty air behind a car and thus allowed closer racing. Closer racing made possible more chance of overtaking which resulted in a wonderful show of racing skill for the audience.

Also this season saw the re-introduction of one of the past-life sins, the re-introduction of ground effects. Ground effects, were one of the marvelous formula one technology introduced back in the 1970s, and it was not recognized by the officials as a manipulation of rules and taking advantage until in 1978 when Mario Andretti won the WDC with his lotus 79. After further investigation, the technology got banned in formula one, only to get re-introduced in 2022.

The re-introduction of ground effects was not as smooth as expected. Ground effects turned out to have its own consequences along with the advantages they give out. The advantages included enormous amount of grip throughout the circuit, as a result the overall pace of the car will increase accordingly. But the disadvantage was a big hit for almost every team for the year 2022. The disadvantage, as said earlier was the issue of proposing, also known as the bouncing of the car throughout the straights of the circuit.

Apart from these, the other specialties of the 2022 season was that, the surprise announcement of Sebastian Vettel, the Four time world champion, that he will be retiring at the end of this season. That was really a sad news but at the same time I was expecting this news from his side for a while. Also at the end of the season we saw a couple more departures, one, of Daniel Riccardo, the eight time race winner, from the team papaya giving his seat to another Australian, Oscar Piastri, the former f2 and f3 winner and one of the most demanding drivers currently on the market.

Also Mick Schumacher, the son of the former Formula one racer, the legend of the game, the seven time world champion Michael Schumacher, said that he will be parting ways with Haas F1 after the 2022 season. The 2022 season was pretty bad for the other seven time world champion, Lewis Hamilton after a while. After almost seven years dominance, Mercedes AMG finally saw their downfall in the 2022 season. Losing the drivers championship in 2021 was pretty tragic for both the team and Lewis, adding fuel to the fire was the hit with the new regulations and introduction of ground effects.

Even after every other teams were capable of de-bugging the issue of proposing, Mercedes was still struggling with a double hard bouncing of the car. This had its own impact on the performance of the two drivers, especially on Lewis Hamilton. The 2022 season was the first time in his career he couldn't find the top spot on the podium at least for once in any season. Meanwhile his teammate George Russel had a decent season where he was able to score consistent points and podiums, and as an added bonus with the W14 he was able to get on the top spot of the podium for once at Brazil 2022.

Coming into the new season, there was a new track added to the calendar, the track which Lewis Hamilton said he wanted back in 2018, Miami. The second track of the United States is the Miami international street Circuit. It is another street circuit like that of Jeddah, Monaco, Baku, Singapore, Australia, and Canada. Also a bunch of circuits which were there during the earlier seasons came back to calendar during the 2022 season, they are Albert Park Australia, Montreal Canada, Marina Bay Singapore, Suzuka Japan and Paul Ricard France.

Along with this incidents, the Russia-Ukraine war played its part in shuffling the formula one 2022 season calendar. As an impact of the war, the FIA decided to cut contacts with their Russian partners and drivers. As a result, Nikita Mazepin, who was already performing pretty bad last season, lost his seat for 2022, also the Russian GP was replaced by Singapore GP. Haas F1 also cut the contracts with their then title sponsor, Ural Kali, the company owned by Nikita Mazepin’s father, Dimitry Mazepin. As Nikita was thrown out and Gunter wanted some real talent to fill that seat he called his then fired employee, Kevin Magnussen.

As from Kevin’s words, he was pretty much surprised to find the call for return, he came back and took the wheel. It was a hell of a season for Haas this year. The last few years from 2020-21 was pretty bad and they couldn't even score a single point finish. The driver line-up was pretty rookie too. After parting ways with Ural Kali and Nikita Mazepin it feels like the Russian curse for Haas is finally gone. This year they had a pretty good point haul, with both drivers scoring points and Kevin Magnusson taking his wheel of maiden pole position.

To talk from the beginning, the 2022 season flagged off with the official testing session at the Spanish track Barcelona Catalunya during 23rd February 2022. McLaren had a strong first day of testing, with their British driver Lando Norris topping the charts. The second day was for the Monegasque, Charles Leclerc , as he took his Ferrari to the top of the timing charts. The very first red flag of the testing session of 2022 was caused by the red-bull RB-18 of Sergio Perez. Also the Haas VF22 of Nikita Mazepin joined the list causing the second red flag of the session.

Second session of testing was conducted at the Losail International Circuit, Bahrain where the inaugural race takes place. The second session was pretty good for Pierre Gasly, the Frenchman racing for Alphatauri as he took his Alphatauri AT03 to the top of the timing sheets. But it was his friend who drives for Ferrari, Charles Leclerc, who dominated the whole morning session, Gasly had a lap good enough to give him the top spot.

One of the big three team that was completely out of the picture during the testing session was Mercedes AMG, because they were severely affected by the proposing issue and was unable to find solutions to the issue. To an extend neither the other teams could debug the issue, but as the season was given the green light gradually most of the teams were able to debug the problem. During the testing sessions Mercedes was unable to put up competitive lap times which was an impact of porposing.

The pre-race free practice sessions were lead by the red-bulls and Ferraris of Max, Perez Charles and Sianz. FP1 saw Pierre Gasly lead the pack in P1, on the second session he gave the lead to Max, who lead the two Ferrari’s to the top. On the third session Max kept his lead while with the help of Perez finishing in P3 he was able to sandwich Charles who finished P2 in the session. At qualifying session, Charles had his time to take revenge on Max and was able to put his Ferrari on the pole position. Max was sandwiched by the 2 Ferraris when Carlos finished P3 and completed the top three.

Inaugural race at Losail International Circuit was where the real test took place. The team in red, Scuderia Ferrari scored with absolute domination, their win after a while, with the Monegasque taking the top spot and the Spaniard taking second, Ferrari completed their first one tow of the season after a long time. But on the first outing, red-bull, who seemed to have a strong car during the testing sessions could not hope for any worse as their two drivers failed to finish the race due to reliability issues. This bad-luck for the Red-Bull team gave Lewis Hamilton a lucky podium with his teammate George Russel finishing just behind him in P4

Max and Charles went full beans during the race and they battled bone to bone during the race. Within a couple of laps they exchanged the lead up to five times as they went on wheel to wheel not backing off an inch and racing hard. It was a reminder of the battle between two old best friends, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, back in 2014, 15 and 16. Here the only difference was that the protagonists were racing for different teams.

Second race was particularly hard compared to the first one as they went to Jeddah Corniche International circuit, the most fearsome street circuit on the calendar after Monaco. Jeddah was scary because it was a street circuit with high speed corners and tight turns. Which means, making even the slightest mistake possible can take you to the barriers. The circuit proved this fact after the race because there was a scary accident during the qualifying session. It was Mick Schumacher who took his Haas to the barriers after he got a little snap of oversteer or understeer while he was putting his flying lap. As a result was had to withdraw participation after the high gravitational impact crash.

It was Max Verstappen who took the Chequerd flag to finish on the top ahead of the two Ferrari’s of Charles and Carlos. But the qualifying session was lead by Sergio Perez who gave out an astonishing lap to take the pole position at Jeddah. But he lead the race away only to pit according to a fake call by Ferrari which was a blunder as it turned out, thanks to Nicholas Latifi who crashed and caused a safety car, which meant everyone else got a cheap pit stop under the safety car. The qualifying session was not exactly what Lewis Hamilton wanted as he was out in q1 for the first time after a while. For Valtteri, Alex, Alonso and Nicholas Latifi was not satisfied with the race results as they had to retire their car due to various reasons. Yuki Tsunoda and Mick Schumacher couldn’t participate due to reliability issues and Yuki failed to set the time within the Q1 requirement.

The third race was were the formula one had its return to the Australian soil. After 2019 it was the first time that F1 raced in Australia, the home soil of the Aussie king, the eight time race winner, Daniel Riccardo. The Circuit, Albert Park was re-surfaced before making the return to the calendar. The first two free practice sessions were dominated by the two Ferrari’s Carlos Sianz and Charles Leclerc respectively and the third session, Lando Norris led the way. But Ferrari came back during the qualifying setting up the pace with Charles finishing at the pole.

On Sunday, Charles maintained the lead to make his maiden win at Albert Park. The other Ferrari driver, Carlos Sainz was unable to make it to the finishing line as he spun out and retired on lap 2. Sebastian Vettel, the four time world champion drove 23 laps before crashing out and retiring on lap 23. The RB 18 of Max Verstappen was not reliable enough at Australia as he too was caught with mechanical issues which resulted in fire on the engine compartment leading to the retirement of the defending champion.

Next eventful race was the fifth round held at the new track, the second one for the United States, the Miami International Auto drome. The inaugural race at Miami was pretty tough job for the drivers as they had a completely new track layout to byheart. It was absolutely the fire test for drivers, and adding fuel to the fire was that it was a street circuit, which means fast corners and neck breaking G forces. The free practice sessions and the qualifying sessions were dominated by the the top three teams. For FP1 Charles lead the way, while for FP2 Russel lead Charles and Checo and for FP3 Checo took the top spot. But it was the two prancing horses who took the top spot during the qualifying sessions with a front row lockout leading the two Red-Bulls of Max and Checo.

The maiden race saw and utter domination by the flying Dutchman who was literally unstoppable. With his win in Miami, He added another track to his winning list. The two Ferraris of Charles and Carlos followed Max to second and third position completing the podium. The maiden race at Miami was not the one Kevin Magnussen, Sebastian Vettel Mick Schumacher, Pierre, Norris and Zhou. Sebastian Vettel and Mick collided which resulted in retirement of Sebastian and Mick finishing P 15. Pierre and Norris Crashed which took both of them out of the race and it was Zhou who kick started the DNF program as he was the first one to retire from the race.

Next interesting race on the calendar was the Monaco Grand Prix 2022, the ultimate test of fire for every single drivers, street circuit with an average track speed of 150 miles an hour and twisty corners and turns giving a hard time for the drivers. It can also be termed as the real test in F1. A win in Monaco is something that every formula one driver dreams of, it takes some serious skill for a driver to crack the Monaco win. This time out it was Ferrari who dominated the first two free practice sessions giving way to the Red-Bull in the third session. But after that sort of a break Ferrari showed pace during the qualifying locking out the front row with their cars, Charles leading the way.

It was not exactly the Free practice session two that the Monaco race winner Daniel Riccardo wanted. He was initially ten minutes late to the session as the mechanics were struggling to sort out a mechanical issue, and as soon as he was on the tack he gave way to the red-flag which took much of the time of the session. What happened was that he lost the rear and shunted the car at the famous Swimming pool section of the track. But at the same time, this time out the home hero had a wonderful qualifying session. Taking his first pole at the home ground. He was trying to improve the time but Perez, who spun out just before the tunnel gave out a yellow which the Spaniard who was following in the Ferrari saw a bit late causing a red-flag and end to the session, giving Charles the maiden pole.

The Sunday was not exactly what the pole man Charles wanted. It was the Red-Bull who dominated the whole Sunday and it was Sergio Perez who took the chequered flag and registered his first win for the season in the initially wet then dry race in Monaco. The initial half of the race was soaked in rain, and the drivers were requested to start behind the safety car after a bit of delay and all drivers had to start the race on full wets due to high intensity rain. As the race progressed rain took the leave and the drivers switched to intermediates and the track started to dry up. But that was when the bad luck for Ferrari came in the form of miscommunication in the pitlane. They called in both Carlos and Charles at the same time which made them loose positions.

Perez took the lead from Charles and finished the race first, Charles was dropped to P4 and Carlos defended the charging Max Verstappen for P2, Max finished P3 completing the podium. Monaco was Sergio’s first win for the 2022 season and he took it with almost 1.1 second gap to Carlos who finished second. As said earlier the pitlane dilemma cost Charles his maiden win in the home ground as he was asked to box when Carlos was on the pits, hence getting held up behind him.

After Monaco, the next highlighted race was at the Canadian soil. F1 returned to Canada, Monteal after a short break of almost three year break. The last appearance of Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, was back in 2019. It was the flying dutchman with a spaceship , the Red-Bull RB18 who topped the first couple of free practice sessions, surprisingly it was the Spaniard with the Alpine, Fernando Alonso who took the top spot for the third session. But Max Verstappen had a comeback in the qualifying session taking the pole position leading the two Spaniards Alonso, who found the pace on the Alpine in the wet track under a rain soaked qualifying session and Carlos with Hamilton in the Mercedes leading Kevin Magnusson for the top five.

Sunday was a whole another story. Max Verstappen converted another pole into a win leading Carlos, Hamilton and Russel to the top four. Surprisingly there was a bunch of DNFs starting with the other Red-Bull of Sergio Perez after just seven laps, he was forced to retire due to mechanical malfunction. The second one was the Haas of Mick Schumacher who was another one forced to retire due to mechanical issues just after just after 18. The last one was Yuki Tsunoda, who took his Alphatauri into the barriers after 47 seven laps. Drama never stepped back in the whole race because Alonso received a five second penalty for making more than one direction change to defend his position. Also Lando Norris was given a five second penalty for speeding in the pitlane.

The next race was on one of the most iconic tracks of the F1, the Silverstone Circuit of Great Britain. The British Grand Prix is one of the most action packed race of the whole calendar after Monaco and Singapore at least for me personally. The first practice was pretty surprising as the first two spots of the chart as it felt like a deja-vu from last year because it was Bottas and Hamilton who took the two top spots, Bottas took his Alfa Romeo to the top spot and Hamilton in his Mercedes followed his former teammate to the second position. The two ferrari’s of Sainz and Leclerc took the third and fourth spots and, surprisingly it was the Haas of Mick Schumacher who completed the top five.

The condition of the first free practice session was pretty tricky. As a result Red-Bull Racing decided not to head out to save tyers for wet soaked Saturday. It was not only Red-Bull racing who were frustrated by the tricky and wet conditions on the track. Mercedes, Alpine, Williams, and Aston Martin who anticipated an hour of dry testing time. The second session of free practice was kind of similar and it was the Ferrari of Carlos Sianz who finished on the top and Hamilton, Norris and Verstappen and Leclerc completed the top five. Lando Norris ran the returning pedal camera for the first time after a long time. Also it was not the exact session of free practice that the championship leader Max Verstappen wanted and he was not satisfied by the performance of the car.

The third session of free practice saw the reigning world champion Max Verstappen getting back up to speed after a low key Friday session, and following the lead was his Red-Bull teammate Sergio Perez. Also the third session saw the team from Brackley showed progress as the introduction of new upgrades at Silverstone started to make changes in the performance of the car. Mercedes was able to find some pace at their home circuit, Silverstone. The qualifying session at the British circuit was rain-soaked and the Spaniard with the Ferrari, Carlos Sianz took his Ferrari to the number one spot and claimed his maiden pole of Formula 1 beating the dominant Dutchman who was on the top through Q1, Q2 and the first half of Q3.

The first lap chaos resulted in the retirement of five drivers, Alex Albon, Zhou Gyanu, George Russel, Valtteri Bottas, Pierre Gasly and last, the Alpine of Esteban Ocon who was forced to retire due to mechanical failure causing a late safety car which was one of the key moment of the race. The podium finishers were the Spaniard who took his maiden win of his career lead Sergio Perez to second place who was followed by the seven time world champion, the home hero Lewis Hamilton for the third spot of the podium.

Next one to be highlighted is the 12th Round, At Paul Ricard France. The first two practice sessions were dominated by the team from Maranello. The first session was dominated by Charles, leading Max, Carlos, Russel and Pierre to complete the top five. The second session was lead by the other ferrari of Carlos, leading Charles, Max. Russel and Hamilton. But the third session saw the Red-Bull getting back on pace with Max and Perez sandwiching the top five. Max lead the way with Carlos, Charles and Lewis following him, and Perez guarded the rear end on P5.

The qualifying session was another smooth day, for Carlos it was the day of team orders. Ferrari showed a bit of collaborative teamwork effort which gave Charles Leclerc the pole position for the race. Carlos towed Leclerc to pole position which gave Ferrari their first French pole position since 1990. Hence Leclerc lead the way followed by Verstappen, Perez, Hamilton and Norris to complete the top five.

The race on the French soil was not something that the Monegasque Charles Leclerc wanted in this whole season. It was pretty heartbreaking for the Ferrari man as he took the car to the barriers when fate came in the form of a snap of oversteer at the 18th lap. Charles was pretty much disappointed as he was leading comfortably, and the win at Paul Ricard was crucial for setting back up the hopes to win the championship again. It was not just Charles who was unable to finish the race, Yuki Tsunoda, Kevin Magnusson, and Nicholas Latifi was the others who were unable to finish the race and ended up retiring. And for the race results, as always it was Max Verstappen who won and the two Mercedes’ of Hamilton and Russel took the second and third spots of the podium. The top five was completed when Perez and Carlos joined the party.

Mc Murtry Speirling: The Irish Thunder Storm Breaking Records!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 05:27:00 +0000

Fan cars, this term seems familiar to some hard core formula 1 fans who have followed the sport for a very long time and know the sport well including the whole history scenario. Yes I am talking about the old-generation F1 team, Brabham F1, quiet famous around the F1 fans for creating something of alien technology of the time. The Brabham BT-46-B, designed by one of the famous designers of all time, Mr Gordon Murray, the founder of Gordon Murray Automotive and his GMA T33. The Brabham BT-46-B entered F1 in the year 1978 and raced for the initial few races until the FIA changed the rules due to the pressure from other teams and banned them from racing again with the same tech.

What actually the big thing with the BT-46-B was that it had a fan behind the back which helped to create more down-force and keep the car planted to the track. This technology helped the team to achieve incredible speeds through corners which drastically increased the overall speed of the car and makes it a race winner. Unfortunately other teams on the game found this as an unfair advantage on technology and urged the FIA for a rule change banning movable aerodynamic structures. As a result this technology got banned in F1 by 1978.

Since then this technology was long gone. But now, in this century where things are coming back with unexpected remastering and use, the whole fan car idea is bought back to life. It is this British start-up found by British Irish man, Sir David McMurtry in 2016, who bought back the whole idea through this concept car; the McMurtry Speirling. The McMurtry Speirling is a 2 million pound 1000 HP electric bat-mobile, the fastest accelerating road car ever, ending the reign of the Croatian rapid thunderstorm. This name, the Irish thunderstorm became loud and started pulling crowd within the last two years, as they began appearing frequently in newspapers and automotive forums and news websites.

Gaining popularity after the 2022 Good Wood festival of speed, the Speirling, a single seat concept car was originally broken cover in the 2021 Good Wood Festival Of Speed, after almost three years of secret developments and study, as a part of the new segment "Future Of Motorsports Power" demonstration run. The man behind the wheels wasn't bad either, the five time Le Mans winner, Derek Bell. As the officials said, the company's motivation behind the car was "To see what could be achieved taking a step away from road cars and existing racing categories". As said, the Speirling was neither type approved for road use nor homologated for racing. It was a build to satisfy relevant Motorsports safety requirements.

During the 2021 Good Wood Festival Of Speed, when the car was broken its cover, the officials stated that they will try to break some records with the Speirling. They kept their word, the 26th of June 2022 saw a Speirling, new updated variant, the Good Wood Edition 2022, bag the trophy for the fastest car to do the Good Wood Hill Climb, doing the 1.87 KM Climb in just 39.08 seconds. It was their official test driver, Max Chilton who was behind the wheels during this occasion. After just three months of the Good Wood hill climb, it also stole the record for the fastest accelerating road car from the Croatian thunderstorm, Rimac Nevera.

With the help of an independent GPS the officials timed the acceleration pull and the quarter mile pull. The Speirling did:

0-60 MPH; 0- 96 KPH Pull in 1.40 seconds

0-100 MPH; 0- 160 KPH Pull in 2.63 seconds

0-145 MPH; 0-233 KPH Pull in 4.98 seconds

0-190 MPH; 0-305 KPH Pull in 9.0 seconds

The standing quarter mile pull in 7.97 seconds

And Pulled all the way up to 200 MPH, that is 320 KPH.

The official power figures says that this car churns out 1000 horsepower from the twin electric motors and the two fans on either sides of the generates 2000 kilos of down-force as mentioned earlier and with almost everything molded out from carbon fibre, the chassis, body, seats and every little thing, this has a kerb weight less than a 1000 kilos. This combination is just menacing for itself. The light weight of the car with a 1000 hp powerhouse is more than enough to create an absolute bat-mobile which with the help of the massive down-force of the fans just be the chart topper on the timing sheets.

These twin fans, as said earlier, placed on either sides of the Speirling provides 2000 kilos of down-force in the stand still and can give out a total of 2250 kilos at high speeds like 150 mph and more. The driver do feel safe driving the car with the monstrous acceleration and high speeds. Because there are safety harnesses like crash structures and a carbon fibre monocoque chassis with integral rollover protection. Also the Speirling has a cornering force less than 3G which makes taking a corner effortless. The technology along with all the above mentioned factors has helped to reduce the power to weight ratio to just 746 KW per 1000 kilos.

The twin motors inside the specially designed E Axle is powered by a 60 kwh battery which is packed tight inside a separate safety cell inside the monocoque, is also efficient enough to give out a range of 300 kilometers per charge as proclaimed by the officials, and this car, as the reports go can drive at GT3 pace, which is an average of 300 to 320 KPH continuously for 30-60 minutes. Also the officials state that with a 200 KW charger, this battery can be charged up to 80% in just 15 minutes, the only task is to find one on your track day.

The Speirling had the first edition in 2021, the car without a rear wing and in 2022 they introduced a much updated version which broke the Good Wood FOS record, the Good Wood Edition 22, with some aerodynamic updates and a rear wing, so that is the best way to differentiate a 21 edition to 22 edition.

One of the most influencive part on the performance of the Speirling is the total aerodynamic design of the car. The design of this car reminiscent that of an old formula one car from the 1960s. The proportions of the car, small in length, width and height, makes it more precise and subtle through the corners carrying more speed. The aerodynamic elements inserted throughout the design such as the front air intakes, clever brake cooling ducts up top on the wheel arches, on the wing mirrors, two fins, one up top on the roof which if spun in high speeds prevents the car from lifting off, the other one behind it, rear diffusers and a rear wing which improves the balance. Aerodynamics helps to reduce the air drag and helps the car to cut through the air smoothly which in turn keep the speed and helps improve lap times.

The Speirling looks absolutely like a bat-mobile from the outside. The aerodynamic elements and the design of this car gives an image of a low lying bird with the wings folded in. Its small, short and literally can go through anywhere, easy to park, easy to maneuver through the city. These are the qualities of a perfect daily driver that you can get. But there is one big hurdle to jump through, it costs you about a couple of millions to buy a Speirling and a road car has not been made yet. But honestly from the way this car looks on the side profile, the reminds me of something that is quiet rare, something that is similar looking from Canada, the Felino CB-7, but a bit short in length. Speirling has 19 inch bespoke shoes on both front and rear covering up the lightweight magnesium alloys with some wide profile bolted into an active air suspension

The interior of the fan car looks like it is taken from a formula one car. This is a single seated hyper-car build in Le Mans standards with a massive windshield which is tinted with iridium to help reduce the glare during high speed driving on a track-day. The whole interior looks absolutely technical again with that F1 steering wheel, seats with lumbar supports and those safety pads according to F1 and Le Mans standards. Being something that is so focused on on-track performance you should never expect those creature comforts inside, this is a proper electric track monster.

Now as a verdict I will say this is something that is entirely different from what we have seen all these days around the automotive industry. The company did what the meant by stepping outside the box and going off the beaten track to build something that is entirely focusing on giving common people the experience of F1 speeds without requesting some big balls to drive the car. Also another fact that makes the car different is how they utilized something that was banned from the world of Formula 1, the fan car idea. Its an Absolute Electric Bat-Mobile. A sing of what technology, idea and man power together can give out.

The Three Point Star Diamond: G Wagen!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:22:00 +0000

The Gelandewagen, better known to the world as the G-Wagen, or colloquially known as the G, introduced with the task of being a mere cross country vehicle, wanting to lock horns with the Japanese and American Legends of the off-road culture, the Land Cruiser and Jeep, which later proved to have the capability of changing the history of the company, is one of the most famous avatars from the German automotive giants Mercedes Benz. To be accurate with the facts, the G Wagon was manufactured by Magna Steyr, the Austrian based automotive manufacturer formerly known by the name, Steyr-Daimler-Puch with their headquarters in Graz Austria. Here is a brief history of the Gelandewagen.

The Gelandewagen, is one of the historical and iconic car from the German giants, Mercedes Daimler Motors. To be more accurate with the words, I should say that the G wagen is sold by Mercedes and manufactured by Magna Steyr. The story starts way back in the early 1970's when the shah of Iraq asked the company to make an off-roader for military purpose. Magna Steyr was all into it and made a beast out of it. The very first model was carved out from wood and then turned into a real life one. Also during the production works, the test mules were tested through worlds most extreme weather conditions of the four different weather conditions. When things were done at the production facility of Graz Austria, the very first example was rolled out of the production line by 1972, with all the masculinity and daredevil look of a military utility vehicle. But the shah of Iran never came back to take the delivery of his military fleet. He passed away and as a result, these cars were sold to the Argentinian Army, who milked every ounce of the car and used it the right way. The very first G had something made it unique at its time and was passed down the generation line, the features which makes a G Wagen what it is, like the boxy design, body-on-frame construction and one of the rarest of its time, fully locking differentials. The military version, as said earlier was gone to the Argentinean army, but Magna Styre had other plans for this car. Apart from discontinuing the model as it is, they just revamped the whole thing and rolled of the production line as the civilian edition, which was in 1979.

Mercedes took this car to the field with zero hopes but for their surprise things worked well and the model was a great success. When the G wagen became a success, they thought about some refinements and a little bit of upgrades from the current model. As a result the first major refreshments came by two years later, in 1981. The '81 model came with an automatic transmission, an air conditioning, and some off-road essentials like the headlamp protection grilles and a cable winch and an auxiliary fuel tank. About an year later they introduced more additions and features to the G wagen. This time they introduced fuel injection, along with more elements of comfort and convenience like auxiliary heating, wider tiers and fender flares. Three years later, in 1985 they added two different locks, the differential locks and central locking system along with tachometers. With all these features and comfort, the G wagen clocked one of the milestones in the journey of production, producing 50-K vehicles. At present, the G wagen still continues effortlessly in production clocking about 43 years of production and still going, turning out to be one of the largest produced vehicles in the history of the company, with the greatest Unimog being the only one to be beaten in front. Within all these years in production, the G had only two generations, the W-460 and W-461.

The W-460, the first generation of the real off-road mules were available with three different options. A two door convertible, a two door wagon and a four door wagon. The first generation were also given the super articulate axle. All the mechanical features were strong and the G of the time gave the confidence to take it anywhere as it passed the 'test of fire' of off-road, which included the harshest conditions, steepest inclines, slippery climbs and almost impossible tracks through the Sochokl mountain which later turned out to be the private testing ground of the G Wagen. The first generation G, the W-460 had its own special editions, and one of them gave the fame to the G itself, which is the Special edition for the Pop of Vatican, John Paul second who came for his maiden visit to Germany. This special edition was a bespoke design, all for the Pop himself. It was painted all white and had a Plastic top box where the pop stood. This incident gave fame for the G wagen in something they were expecting the least, luxury.

The update that was supposed to be second generation, but turned out to be a rather chassis change and addition of luxury, the W-463 was a rather fully revised G wagen with a new chassis number W-463, the second generation gave the G a whole new face, than that of the rough and tough spartan look, a more humbling luxurious look. With all the new high end luxury trims and features added into the package along with much smoother looks around the outside meanwhile on the interior they introduced with a brud wood trim and a leather interior upholstery. By 1994, the model was renamed as the G-Class from the Gelandewagen. As for me after this shook things up and from then on, the proper G wagen DNA went on to die expect for some selective models. Rather than being just a comfy machine, the Gelandewagen had proven himself a monster at the track, going the off beaten track and won the 1983 Paris Dakar rally championship with the pilots Jackiy Ickx and Clande Brasseur piloting this machine all the way up to P-1. Later by the timeline they introduced the beast again under their performance wing in the name AMG G Wagon. This was packed in with the 5.5 Liter twin turbocharged V-8 pumping out 350 hp with a more aggressive trim and packages which included an aggressive side exhaust and more. In 2005, Mercedes AMG rolled out the G-55 AMG with a supercharged V-8 spitting out 469 hp and having the 0-100 in almost 5.5 seconds, being a Porsche enthusiast I think this is 911 of the time.

Mercedes Benz originally did not consider selling the G outside Europe, which makes sense to say that it was imported to USA, and changed the spec accordingly for the American Standards and set into the American markets by a Mexican registered importer, Europa. This went on to sell like hot cakes and within a small period of time when the G-500 was introduced in 1998, and it was an unexpected success story which attributed Europa the status of "Small Volume Manufacturer" and got the rights of exclusive importer and distributor of the company Mercedes Benz. But eventually Mercedes threw them out of the business by acquiring the sales rights through a purchase and in 2001 they officially entered the United States Market. Along with the G-Class, they began selling the proper line-up of the company. Also this G went on to be popular among the people of united states as the US Marian Course ordered a fleet of 157 Gelandewagen fast attack vehicles, and this was specifically for the primary use of the G, as a military workhorse, for the war of Iraq and Afghanistan. The G-Wagen holds the record for the longest years in production model of Mercedes Daimler AG after their masterpiece, the Unimog.

That is all about how the Beast was made. Within the long time of 43 years in production, there have been quiet a bit of special editions and one-off derivations of the Gelandewagen. Lets talk more about this unique piece of artworks. Some remarkable special editions of the Gelandewagen are 500 GE, G-500 Classic Edition, Grand Edition, G-Class Cabriolet Final Edition 200, G-500 4X4^2, Maybach 650 Landaulet, and some of the AMG editions like the G-63 AMG, G-65 AMG, and the G-63 AMG 6X6.

500 GE

The 500 GE was the first ever limited edition Gelandewagen produced in the history of the company. This one was called a limited edition because this one featured in it for the very first time, the iconic Mercedes V-8 for the Gelandewagen, which later in the time turned out to be a menacing combination. This was a 5 door Long Wheel Base G with the V-8 under the hood that have been on production for the one year time between 1993 and 94.

G 500 Classic Special Edition

The G 500 Classic Special Edition was one of the Luxurious and equipped Gelandewagen specially made in the year 1999 for marking the 20th anniversary of the Gelandewagen. And this contained some of the iconic Mercedes features like the V-8 from the G-500, with the Almandinschwarz Metallic 182 paint job and unique 18 inch alloy wheels as the shoe. The Classic special edition payed homage to the original Gelandewagen, and that was pretty clear from the way that car was built, drawing inspiration from the original G. Being more accurate with words, the G-500 Classic Special edition was technically modern but was made to look classic with the classic appearance and approach.

Grand Edition

The Grand edition for the Mercedes G wagen is a special edition for the states which was shipped to as a result of the decision to call of production in the US. All these was happening by the year 2006. On the outside, the Grand edition was coated with one of the exclusive premium finish of the time, the Allnite Grey Mango Metallic finish. This finish was adorned in contrast, with the brushed aluminum trim stripes with "Grande Edition" lettering. Interior was made special and luxurious with matte silk wood trim throughout the dashboard and central console. Designo Exclusive leather upholstery and door sills enhanced with illuminated "Grande Edition" Lettering.

G Class Cabriolet Final Edition

As soon as Mercedes planned to draw back the production of their G wagen two door Cabriolet model, they introduced the G Class Cabriolet Final Edition, the last of its kind model as a tribute for the outgoing model. Of the 200 units produced, all of them were sold out before the model was out of the covers in the event premiered in the 2013 Frankfurt motor show. Specially crafted exterior design with beige coated soft top and tonneau, chrome plated grille, five spoke light alloys made luxurious in titanium grey and with a Finale Edition Badge on the B pillar. Inside the Final Edition Mercedes gave designo leather seats with black trim and satin finished light brown wood trim along with AMG Steering Wheel.

G 500 4x4^2

The G 500 4x4^2 was a derivative form, built as a continuation of the G-63 AMG 6x6 formula. This was a long wheel base 5 door station wagen built on top of a shortened chassis of a G 63 AMG 6X6. This came packed under the hood with a 4.0 liter Bi-turbo V-8 engine which had a juicy 416 horsepower. This along with the Humvee off-road specifications gave the G an overall character of a rough and tough SUV along with Also this was comparatively shorter in length but taller in height. This in turn increased the ride height and gave more ground clearance with wider track than a regular G.

Mercedes Maybach 650 Landaulet

The Maybach 650 Landaulet was the very first sports Utility Vehicle under the Maybach badge of Mercedes. Announced officially in the 2017 motor show, the Maybach 650 Landaulet can be figured as a combination of other G models merged together, in the very best way possible. This Landaulet is having the extended chassis and raised suspension from G-500 4x4^2. The rear end was teared off from the W 463 Cabriolet with folding fabric roof and fixed in to the Landaulet. Meanwhile the rear passenger doors were collected from the Extended Wheelbase 2001. The Face of the Landaulet was taken from an AMG G 65 and to add more luxury they just added more chrome to the recipe. Adding the juice to the veins is from a twin turbo V-12 sourced out from the AMG G 65 which churns out 621 horses at full beans.

Further more there are AMG performance models like the G 63 AMG, G 65 AMG, G 63 AMG 6X6 and more performance models form the performance wing of Mercedes, the Mercedes AMG. The 6x6 was one of the bespoke builds from the Mercedes, built after taking inspiration from the Aussie Army specific build, a 6x6 Mercedes Gelandewagen, which was an absolute mammoth.

Gelandewagen, originally was born as a tough-build, the master of mud and go-anywhere cross country vehicle. It is pretty accurate and disappointing at the same time to hear that the G is largely misused just as a status vehicle doing the neighborhood runs to the grocery store and downtown, rather than giving it a mud bath and taking it off the beaten track.

The Ultimate Ultimae For India: The N/A Garage's Ultimae!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:59:00 +0000

Lamborghini Aventador, the one model from the Italian marquee which needs no much introduction to be said for. Even I’ve done more than one article on the whole V-12 Lamborghini Bloodline. Scroll down the line to find them and read. So as said on my earlier posts, the Aventador is the spiritual successor of the Countach, one of the iconic makes from the Italian production house, and the successor of the Murciélago, another raging bull famous for the rough handling and drivability.

The Aventador was introduced as a more tamable, modern make from the company, looking forward to sustain the model as their long term project. Carrying the DNA traits from the spiritual great great grandfather Miura, the spiritual great grandfather Countach, the spiritual grand father Diablo and the predecessor Murciélago, the Aventador was an absolute hit in the market, gaining popularity and building reputation for being one of the most iconic contemporary classics from Automobili Lamborghini.

Breaking the cover of the very first avatar back in the 2011 Geneva International Motor show, it started the journey on the roads around the world conquering the hearts of the public. Aventador was and is still famous its aggressive styling and the very powerhouse packed into it-the iconic Lamborghini Naturally Aspirated V-12 engine.

Through the timeline of the model, Aventador got a wide variety of derivations, performance editions and more. According to the Lamborghini model layout each model had their roadster and coupe versions. The very first one was the LP-700-4 and its roadster version, the second one was the Aventador SuperVeloce and its roadster version, the third one was the Aventador S and its roadster version, the fourth one was the Aventador SVJ, the SuperVeloce Jota and its roadster, and last but not the least the Aventador Ultimae and its roadster form. Each new iteration had their own cosmetic and performance updates given the timeline.

The Aventador Ultimae is the final hurrah to the glorious era of raging bulls, the last derivative of the Aventador series. They have named it pretty accurate! I have done a post describing the whole Aventador Bloodline which is why I am shortening the details, if you want to read that check it out on the blog. The Aventador Ultimae LP-780_4 being the last of its kind is limited in numbers. There are about 350 Coupe variants and 250 Roadster variants which are rolling off the production line.

As for the looks and overall appearance, the Ultimae looks as pleasing as an Aventador S, not as wild as an SVJ, but still low and lurking like an SV. Yeah the youngest brother shares the same trait, almost!. As of the other Aventadors, this young one packs in the latest iteration of the power packed naturally aspirated V-12 engine, the L-539 6.5-L NA V-12 spitting out some serious power figures of 780 horsepower and 720 N-M of torque. I should say that is something that suits the last hurrah. After being unveiled globally, the Ultimae has reached Indian shores too.

There are a total of four Aventador Ultimaes in India, two coupes and two roadsters. They are Praveen Agarwal's (@Praveen212) LP-780_4 Roadster Giallo Auge with Arancio accents, the maiden Ultimae to touch the Indian shores. Another LP-780_4 Roadster AdPersonam Arancio Bruciato owned by Mr Rohan Singh (@Rohan8174), the first Ultimae in the world to be chosen in this color. An LP-780_4 Coupe AdPersonam Viola Parsifae, the first coupe variant for India, the bull, bought by an unknown owner that currently sleeps in the darkness of a garage in Pune, Maharashtra. And Last But not the least, the most expensive raging bull to reach the Indian shores, the highest specced raging bull in the whole Asian continent, the LP-780_4 Coupe AdPersonam Rosso Efesto owned by The N/A Garage (@The_NA_Garage) from South India.

The owner, who has not disclosed his name yet, is one of the die hard worshipers of the Italian automobile pioneer, Automobili Lamborghini. Which is a clear statement from the name itself. Through this account (@The_NA_Garage) our man is expressing his overflowing love and respect towards the company. He has put up into words some of his track day experiences and other Lamborghini related news and thoughts, you should read them they are just lovely.

The story of this specific example of the Ultimae is pretty interesting. Being a Lamborghini freak, @The_NA_Garage wanted to own a raging bull so badly and he wanted it to be pretty special too. He contacted the only authorized dealer of Lamborghini in south India, @LamborghiniBengaluru and placed an order for a beast. While speccing his car, he chose many of the expensive options available for his Kohinoor Of the bulls in India.

It was from the same dealership that he got the car delivered to. Being his maiden Lamborghini, The NA Garage chose to take the delivery of the car through 'LA PRIMA', as he chose for the factory collection, the most exclusive and expensive way to get your bull out. He is one of the only three to four costumers to take delivery of their examples through this very special way. As a part of the LA PRIMA delivery, the costumer gets an exclusive privilege of visiting the company headquarters in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy and to visit the production line up close in person, where the bulls roll out.

As if this car wasn’t special enough, the owner wanted to make it extra special by adding the signatures of Lamborghini Executives inside the engine bay of this car. When he requested Lamborghini Bengaluru for that, it didn’t go as planned.

But, the almighty always recognizes and rewards those who possess deep passion. The owner managed to get the signatures and a special drawing of the Countach LPI800-4 by Mitja Borkert, the Head of Design inside the engine bay during the La Prima factory delivery in Italy.

He felt much honored and humbled to have received the key to his maiden Lamborghini in the presence of this top level officials. His car got signed by Mr. Fabio Meneghetti (@FabioMeneghetti.9) the Product Manager, Lamborghini Aventador, Mr. Domenico Beccia the Customer Journey & Retail Marketing Head, Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A, Ms. Erika Puccetti the Shift Leader, Lamborghini Aventador Production Line, Ms. Camilla Keim (@CamiKeim ) the Customers Specialist and Studio Manager, Lamborghini AdPersonam, Mr. Giulio Bai the Legal Services, Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A who were present on the occasion.

They signed the bull on the right engine bay. The cherry on the top was, as said earlier, the hand drawn sketch of Lamborghini Countach LPI-800_4, the newest edition of the spiritual grandpa of Aventador Ultimae, done on the spot by Mr Mitja Brokert (@MitjaBorkert), the Design Director at Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. The bull can definitely have the bragging rights for the exclusivity of these signs and sketches!. After his "Drago" landed in India and completed the pre-delivery inspection, @The_NA_Garage sent him to Ceramic Pro Bengaluru for detailing and applying a complete PPF coating.

More about the Asia's most expensive specification, this piece of icon is finished in Rosso Efesto paint job from the AdPersonam Pellet, which itself makes the car look more glossy, like a super strong red wine, something that is more than enough to pull some crowd and turn some head wherever you go. This shade is not something like a fluorescent or bright red, but a more dark, subtle one. In contrast with the paint job, there are plenty of shiny black carbon fibre accents all around such as the Front Bonnet Air Outlets, A-Pillars, entire roof panel, Rear Air scoops, the c-pillar intakes and many more to count.

The contrasting finish makes the car to be presented like a rare piece of artwork. The owner chose for transparent engine compartment lid than that of exposed carbon lid, which gives us a sneak peek of a sleeping beast caged inside, the iconic NA V-12.

As on every other Lamborghini, there is the Black Anodized Hexagonal firing order Plaque on the lower part of the T shape Carbon Fibre Trim piece saying "V12 ORDINE DI ACCENSIONE 1 12 4 9 2 11 6 7 3 10 5 8". This was first introduced as an ornament on the Lamborghini Diablo. The public got hooked up by that and seeing the positive response from the crowd, Lamborghini decided to expand this ornament to their other models.

This example wears the Leirion Forged Lightweight center lock wheels, which first showed up in the Aventador SVJ, the SuperVeloce Jota, painted in matte bronze with contrasting red calipers and red anodized center lock with shiny black lock caps with Lamborghini Logo inscribed on it. The exterior is overall in contrast with some standard finishes, shiny black dipped carbon fibre matte black accents along with Bronzo Oreadi finished pinstripe adds the final touch to the top level exterior.

The whole interior is upholstered with Nero Cosmus Alcantara which is proper Black, with contrasting Bronze stitching along with Nero Ade, the dark grey and Rosso Alala which is Bright Red. The contrast of Nero Cosmus, Bronzo, Nero Ade and Rosso Alala is just perfect for the overall color scheme of the car and works beautifully well inside the Lamborghini. The owner went for a complete package, the interior carbon pack, which adds shiny carbon fibre bits around the cockpit. And being the only one option, the owner went for electric and heated seats with exposed carbon back ends which is on the side of comfort rather than the performance focus.

The standard LAMBORGHINI badge on the passenger side is inscribed in shiny black finish, the AVENTADOR is inscribed on the door sills in white color. On the side bolsters the name ULTIMAE is embroidered in Bronzo finish and the Lamborghini Shield on the head-rest as every other Lamborghini and is also finished in Bronzo. The drivers side A pillar has a unique plaque of authentication, finished in exposed carbon fibre and cut into a hexagonal shape. Inside the plate there is this inscription in white which says "AVENTADOR ULTIMAE 001 DI 350". Every Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae customer will get this inscription plate which is a kind of authentication from the company themselves.

As I have mentioned earlier, this Aventador Ultimae packs in the iconic Lamborghini NA V12, the one from 2 M dollar Lamborghini Countach LPI-800_4, a L-539 6.5 L Naturally Aspirated V12 which is capable of producing 780 HP and 720 NM when coupled with 7 speed single clutch ISR Automated Manual gearbox with violent but crunchy shifts. This will do the 0-60 MPH pull in 2.8 seconds, 0-124 MPH pull in 8.7 seconds and keeps pulling all the way up to 221 MPH which is 355 KPH.

It seems @The_NA_Garage just went down the factory to check every single box in the spec sheet for his Lambo, because the official price tag is not released yet but it is estimated to be around 1.3 Million
USD, I agree with my brother calling it the Kohinoor of the Bulls!. The Base price of the Aventador Ultimae Coupe is 498,260 USD and that of the Ultimae Roadster is 546,850 USD. So if you are cruising down the streets of the South Side, South India, look out for a red raging bull lurking down the streets which is ready to pounce on you with a violent roar!.

Man And Meachine Hani Mustafa And His G!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 14:23:00 +0000

The Gelandewagen, better known to the world as the G-Wagen, or colloquially known as the G, is one of the most famous avatars from the German automotive giants Mercedes Benz. To be accurate with the facts, the G Wagon was manufactured by Magna Styre, the Austrian based automotive manufacturer formerly known by the name, Styre-Daimler-Puch with their headquarters in Graz Austria. Here is a brief history of the Gelandewagen and one of the proud owner of the original first batch import to India, the rare of the rarest, 1989 first batch import Mercedes Benz Gelandewagen 300 GD and the proud owner, Mr Hani Mustafa, one of the well known automotive journalist.

First things first, lets have a word about the man, Hani Mustafa. Hani Mustafa, dear to south Indians by the name 'Hanikka' is an automotive enthusiast, expert, food lover and one of the most famous automotive journalist around the globe. He is one of the veterans of the game with massive experience under his belt and tonnes of knowledge about the game he is into. One of the Top ten automobile journalists in India and the Most Followed Auto Journalist in Southern India. Hani Mustafa is the Editor in charge of the automotive show in YouTube, Flywheel Automotive By Hani Mustafa, where does the job as an automotive journalist. Also, the cherry on the top is that he is one of the six Indians and the only one from south India in the jury board of the World Car Awards who elects the World Car Of The Year, and the Indian iteration, Indian Car Of The Year Awards. Hani's love for cars started young, yeah as soon as he can read and write he began reading and talking cars all around. Its that enthusiasm from the very young age that made him one of the shining stars of the game. Hani Mustafa has written a gorgeous article about how he found this gem of a machine. He is a columnist, content creator for YouTube, and channel show host, juror of World Car Awards, Indian COTY awards More than that he is a motivational speaker spreading positivity all around.

Yeah that is it about the man and now more about the machine, the great car from the German giants, Mercedes Daimler Motors. To be more accurate with the words, I should say that the G Wagen is sold by Mercedes and manufactured by Magna Styre. The story starts way back in the early 1970's when the shah of Iraq asked the company to make an off-roader for military purpose. Magna Steyr was all into it and made a beast out of it. The very first model was carved out from wood and then turned into a real life one. Also during the production works, the test mules were tested through worlds most extreme weather conditions of the four different weather conditions. When things were done at the production facility of Graz Austria, the very first example was rolled out of the production line by 1972, with all the masculinity and daredevil look of a military utility vehicle. But the shah of Iran never came back to take the delivery of his military fleet. He passed away and as a result, these cars were sold to the Argentinian Army, who milked every ounce of the car and used it the right way. The very first G had something made it unique at its time and was passed down the generation line, the features which makes a G Wagen what it is, like the boxy design, body-on-frame construction and one of the rarest of its time, fully locking differentials. The military version, as said earlier was gone to the Argentinean army, but Magna Styre had other plans for this car. Apart from discontinuing the model as it is, they just revamped the whole thing and rolled of the production line as the civilian edition, which was in 1979.

Within the next ten years they rolled out the civilian version and two generations of the Gelandewagen, namely the W460 and the W461. Also within these years they have given the car significant refreshments which was important from time to time. It was in 2008 that our man finds out about the hot-cake up for sale. Hani Mustafa from his younger age craved for a G-Wagen so hardly and was constantly on the search for one of the iconic piece of history for himself. It was his friend who is a used vehicles shop owner that said him about the news and the car was at their showroom at Delhi. This one, up for sale was a 1986 made, 1988 registered 300 GD, driven by a 3.0L diesel engine with four speed manual gearbox, third face-lift, the Puch Edition Coupe one of the first batches of civilian edition rolled out of the production facility. This specific G Wagen was imported to India after three years it rolled out to the showroom, 1989 and have been used as many officials' car. This one was initially used as the embassy car for the Canadian embassy and was then used as the embassy car for the Mauritius embassy, then it was gone into the hands of an exporter from 2000 and he was at the time the owner of the registration and kept the documents until it was passed down to Hani in the year 2008. Hani was pretty impressed by the condition of the G and proceeded ahead to buy the G. He was delighted beyond words finally to get hands to one of his dream cars that he has carved so much for. After purchasing, he went on to be pretty adventurous and drove the all the way back to home, Kozhikkode, with his family, and as I mentioned earlier, he has written a gorgeous article about the journey beyond 2900 kilometres. Click here to read that.

After getting home with the G he didn't just put it up like a show-piece, yeah nothing sadder than caging a beast that craves an outing a day, he made some interesting modifications and complete restoration which was something that the G craved for, which made it better. He kept the overall looks completely stock and classy but repainted it matte black from the frozen white, and installed headlamp guard and indicator guard. He also changed the wheels and imported new bigger and tougher wheels from United Kingdom. With the introduction of bigger wheels, Hani also built up new bullet studded matte black alloy wheels. Also he has done some re-works on the upholstery on the interior. But what I personally like is the way he has kept the G stock with the looks apart from giving it some of the necessary updates more than an upgrade. His care for his car says it all about his personality, also this shows how much he craved for the car. That is what a true petrol-head is, no matter what car a true petrol-head has, they will car it like a family member giving it the out most care and respect it needs. Now even though the current generation 'G-Classes' looks like a Gelandewagen, for me they are more like a luxury toy and a status symbol, the real DNA of the G Wagen was gone in 1994 when they took out the name Gelandewagen was renamed as the G-Class as per the new naming structure. Yeah the new Gs are comfortable and luxurious but, as they say, old is always gold. The real beast.

Du Bist Veltmister! Danke Seb!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 17:49:00 +0000

Sebastian Vettel. An young German Hot-shoe with a great sense of humor, who made F1 popular to the public with his charismatic character and breathtaking performances around the circuit, has finally joined social media, which means only one thing, the end of his world class career in F1. This post is a humble tribute for Seb, recollecting his iconic moments and journey to the pinnacle of motor-sports. Sebastian Vettel was born in the 3rd July of 1987, at Heppenheim of West Germany, he had shown his taste for racing from his younger ages. Having taken the first taste of racing in the age of three, Sebastian showed his talent in racing from the first stage when he started racing in carting series after five years. Gradually he began mastering the skill on carting and in the year 1998 he was accepted to the Red-Bull Junior racing team and won some well known cups like the Junior Monaco Carting Championship and others in 2001. Climbing up the different levels of racing competitions, he took the first taste of Formula 1 in 2006 Turkey testing session where he became the third driver of BMW Sauber F1 team when Robert Cubica, the Polish icon, replaced Jacques Villinevue. Vettel made his debut in the same year, bagging the record of the youngest driver on the paddock of his time to make a race week debut, on the 2007 USA GP at Indianapolis circuit replacing the injured Cubica, with the age of 19 years and 53 days. He also collected his first penalty in the same race, a nine second time penalty for exceeding speed limits in the pit lane.

He made his first proper F1 race debut in the year 2007 with BMW Sauber as said earlier and he scored his first points on the day out at the Indianapolis circuit, qualifying 7th and finishing P8. His F1 career got into full swing motion when he got a chance to show his skills with his parent team, red-bull racing's sister team Torro-Rosso, when he replaced Scott Speed, the American racing driver, who was dropped mid season due to inefficient performance. His first proper F1 race appearance was at the 2007 Hungarian GP, where he finished P20 in Qualifying and finished the race in P 16 after four others retired from the race. The Japanese GP, was another black-mark on his career, but he did well in the qualifying, taking his Torro-Rosso all the way up to P 9. But in the race it was all bad luck for him as he struggled and eventually retired from the race at the 46th lap due to collision damage with his then-to-be-teammate Mark Webber. That was probably the start of the German-Australian rivalry which set the paddock on fire at the prime days of Vettel. But the very next race held at Asia, the 2007 Chinese GP saw Vettel getting back in shape and having his then-career-best finish in the race. Qualifying way back in P 12 and fighting all the way up to P 4 gaining a total of 8 positions after a seemingly exhausting race in mixed conditions was where Vettel started finding his groove. This magnificent performance by Vettel set out talks about his talent and the amount of speed he milked from the Torro-Rosso.

The very next season, 2008 turned out to have a bad start with three consecutive DNFs and it was when they reached Monaco that Seb Started finding the rhythm of the season and the new car. Qualifying himself way back in P 18, Vettel just set the track on fire with such a mesmerizing drive taking his Torro-Rosso all the way up to P 5, all this in the tightest track of F1, the streets of Monaco with a car capable of fighting the middle and lower middle orders, it was a finish clearly worth of a victory. The 2008 season, had hidden a trophy for Vettel, and did not find it until the Italian GP. The Italian GP saw Vettel taking up his maiden victory of F1, which was from his very first pole which gave him another record of the youngest pole-sitter in the history of the sport and to make it better, he won the race building up a gap of 12.5 seconds over the second position, Heikki Kovalainen of McLaren Mercedes. And at the end of the season, that was the only win for the team, Torro-Rosso as it turned out. This victory out of the blue was so good that the media started comparing him to Michael Schumacher the Great, and it gave him the name "Baby Schumi". Also he was selected as the rookie of the season, 2008 after his beyond the age performance in the mixed conditions and the wet track.

2009 season was something like a dream for Vettel as he was promoted into the parent team, red-bull replacing David Coulthard the 13 times GP winner, and had a superb debut race at the 2009 Australian GP until fate played its role in the form of the polish racing legend, Robert Cubica. A crash with Cubica forced him to retire. He did compensate for that with the next few races. He went on to take his maiden pole position on the Chinese GP which at the end he won and gave the team their maiden pole. The form continued for the next few races, The Silver Stone GP and the inaugural Abu Dhabi GP which let him finish on the second top spot behind the 2009 World Champion, Jensen Button. He had a blistering drive at the 2009 Japanese Grand Prix. An absolute masterclass where, from the pole position he took the win leading every single lap. That season, Vettel took the award for the fastest lap given by DHL.

The next season, the 2010 season started well for Vettel as he took the first pole position of the season in the Bahrain GP, and was on a comfortable lead until a spark plug failure made him tremble down the order and finish the race in P4. He posted his first win of the season at the Malaysian GP. Sebastian Vettel at the Australian Grand Prix was appointed as the Director of Grand Prix Drivers Association. The spark for the great Webber-Vettel war got ignited when the went to Turkey. Seb and Mark were head to head on points before turkey but Webber was ahead as he got more wins in his name. They both started quiet well and was running peacefully with Webber first and Vettel second. Things got heated up when Vettel tried to pass Webber for the lead which resulted in them colliding to each other putting Seb out of the race, what turned the heat up was neither of them took the responsibility of the crash. Vettel clinched his first world championship trophy at the 2010 Abu-Dhabi GP and went on to take three more, getting leveled on with another legend, Juan Manual Fangio and adding a bunch of records to his name. He got to share the track with his idle and his biggest inspiration, the ever remembering, Michael Schumacher, the legend of Ferrari. With four world titles grabbed consecutively and with a bunch of records, whole lot of points, podiums and fastest laps, by 2014 Seb parted ways with Red-Bull, a 15 year long partnership, after giving them 4 constructors titles, and joined hands with Ferrari, the most successful team in the history of the sport following the path of the man he looked up to, fantasying another title with them, just like his idle.

Having had the first race with Ferrari in 2015, Seb shared his seat with the iceman cometh, Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 world champion. Joining Ferrari with the hope of a fifth world title, Seb worked as hard as he can with the team for that fifth one. For the first few years, the combination of Sebastian and Ferrari turned out to be a brutal one. Together they raised a huge threat to the unbeaten journey of Mercedes, the silver arrows. Seb fought hard against Mercedes, still maintaining the much needed respect but every single time the trophy slipped away from his hands at the last moment. 2018 was one of those years were he has performed immaculately well but with the unfortunate crash in the Home GP, Germany 2018 took the championship away from him, and that was the closest he could come in challenging the the rivals Mercedes. But the tide turned to the opposite direction by the last two years, 2019 and 2020 when Ferrari was accused for cheating through a technical anomaly and was punished for cheating, as a result they trembled down the orders and had their worst nightmare of a season in 2020, the last year with Ferrari. Seb too got affected with all these chaos happening around, he finished with his lowest ever points on the bag, with just 33 and a P3 at the Turkish GP being his best finish of the season. Ferrari, by the end of the season announced that they are parting ways with Sebastian Vettel, which obviously was sad for everyone who was on the paddock, and then he joined Aston Martin F1 team. I personally think why Seb left Ferrari was because of because he was pretty disappointed with the performance of the car that he couldn't get that fifth world title with Ferrari even after craving for it so badly. There are a few more reasons, there were a tonne of conflicts within the team and at the final year, these conflicts resulted in the lack of team coordination and chemistry which are the two important factors in the smooth functioning of the team.

After parting ways with the team in red, Seb joined hands with the team in green, the British team, Aston Martin F1 team replacing Sergio Perez who went to Red-Bull replacing Pierre Gasly. This was in a way ironic because now his car is powered by the power unit from his greatest rivals back in the Ferrari days. The Aston Martin Days were not as good as expected since it was way different, less powerful car from that of Ferrari, but he made the Sebastian magic work, scored his first points at the day out in Monaco, finishing P 5 and gave them their maiden podium, finishing his highest ever with the team, P2 finish at Azerbaijan GP, Baku. Also he fought all the way up to P2 in the Hungarian GP but was disqualified after failing to submit the required fuel sample for test. Even with a midfield potential car given to him, Seb made the best of it. Because he was awarded the maiden award for the most overtakes done in a season with 132 overtakes with the green tractor. The second year with Aston Martin was not as good as the first year as he was shot with covid 19 and he was replaced by Nico Hulkenburg for the first two races. And it was by the July he announced his retirement after creating a social media account on Instagram as I said earlier.

Apart from open wheel racing, Seb was an active participant on the Race Of Champions, also known as the ROC, where he raced alongside his idle, Michael Schumacher where both represented their home team, Germany, with whom he won the titles from 2007 to 2012. Then he took a break for 3 years and came back alongside other German teammate, Nico Hulkenberg. In his return to ROC, he won his very first individual ROC title beating Tom Kriestensen in the final. The team of Nico and Sebastian finished runners up in the 2015 season. The 2017 ROC was won by the team Germany, even though Seb was eliminated in the first heat of individual competition but won the cup for his country by himself after his teammate Pascal Wehreline got injured after a crash earlier. Two years later he along with Mick Schumacher, the son of Michael, took their spot on the ROC again and this time they finished runners up. Then in 2022 he went all the way up to final and was beaten there by Sebastian Lobe.

After this eventful 17 years of formula 1, Now Sebastian Vettel is looking forward to spend some time with his family. Wishing you all the very best wishes and a happy retirement with your family. Thank you Sebastian for everything you have done to make the sport what it is right now, it was our immense pleasure watching you driving for Red-Bull, Ferrari and Aston Martin. You are an absolute Jewel of the sport, we are forever grateful to you for giving us all the cute and wholesome moments in the sport, moreover winning the four consecutive world titles is the icing on the cake. Even leaving the fifth title as an illusive dream, you have made your spot in the minds of us racing fans and on the top position with the iconic legends.

Every journey that starts has to end at some point, whatever we say that's how it works. Its so sad to see you leaving but that's how things should be... Parting ways with you is one of the hardest things as a follower of the sport, but yeah wishing you all the very best from the bottom of my heart, yeah at the end we, all the fans want you to be happy, and still we hope to see you around the paddock. For all the funny, cute, wholesome angry and happy moments you've created, for all the achievements you have bagged and for being a true man of inspiration on and off track just like Lewis, Danke Seb! Danke Schon!

Living the Porsche Life: A Short Story!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

"I Couldn't Find the sports car I dreamed of, So I decided to build to Myself"

This are the words from the iconic German automaker, the Great-father of German automotive industry, the man who initiated the build of some of the most iconic and evergreen cars of all time, Dr Ferdinand Porsche, the founding father of Porsche Automobili, the guys from the garage at Stuttgart. Porsche cars are always well known for their classic, never changing signature look which is cute for a car, and the outright power and peak performance when you really want to give it full beans. Yeah Mild on the road and wild on the track. For many, many enthusiasts, Porsche is the perfect car for their daily drive and weekend track-days, the perfect mixture of beauty and the beast.

We'll have to travel back in time to the 1900s, to 1931 when the German guy Ferdinand Porsche with his two friends Adolf Rosberg and Antoine Piech founded a Motor vehicle development and consulting agency. The turning point came when the company received an order to develop a car, accessible and accountable for the common people of Germany. The order was given by Adolf Hitler, the then monarch of Germany. Ferdinand and his friends geared up to work and that gave birth to Hitlers dream,the peoples car or the Volkswagen, the model was named the Beetle. Almost 52 thousand of them were produced and were one of the hits of Germany. Later in the day, Beetle had some special editions or the military spec called the Kublewagen, which was produced during the time of the second world war. The beetle was loved for its design and practicality and it was Ferdinand, who designed the car, aka bug.

8 years later Ferdinand decided to make a car of his own instead of designing and building it for someone else, so he developed the first official Porsche car the Porsche 64 but it saw extensive use of Volkswagen parts especially from the beetle. But by 1945 he was arrested and took to jail by the government for committing war crimes and was put up in jail for almost two years. On the 20th month of imprisonment, Ferry Porsche, the son of Ferdinand decided to take over the captaincy of the ship and build a new car, this adventure was because he couldn't find a car that suited him. But he was welcomed by some of the toughest working conditions and challenges to the throne because he had to steer through some of the toughest days for the next two years until his father came out of the prison. Unofficially the first model of the company was the Porsche 365, whose wooden model were carved out inside a sawmill in Austria. The production was flagged off after they were hit with sufficient pre orders. As I said earlier, it can be said that this is unofficially the first Porsche because it was sold. The very next year the Porsche 365 became road legal and within the next two years, the production of the Porsche 365 was taken over by his fathers production team,Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche GmbH in Stuttgart. The Porsche 365 also used many parts such as the Engine case from the internal combustion, Transmission and several parts of suspension.

The Porsche 365 had evolutionary stages A B and C while in production and in each stages the number of parts sourced from Volkswagen went down the line and were replaced by original equipment manufactured from Porsche's own factories. The body was designed by Erwin Komenda who also took his part in designing the beetle. Thereafter, Porsche's signature builds began gaining popularity all over the world, and their signature builds included air cooled rear engined cars which were rare for the time being, Porsche, from their early stages are always known for the well balanced recipe they give to the car.

One of the interesting thing about Porsche is their logo, because during my younger ages, this logo always confused me with that of Ferrari's Prancing horse, I think many of you had the same thing with yourself. The Porsche logo is a bit different from that of the other and it stems from Coat Of Arms of the Free People's State of Württemberg Coat of arms of Württemberg of Wiemar Germany along with the coat of arms of Stuttgart, a prancing horse in the middle, Wiemar-era Württemberg Coat of arms. In 1972, the company changed from Limited Partnership legal form to Public Limited Company which was the aftermath of Ferry Porsche's "No Family Members in the company" idea which he took from the Japanese pioneer, Soichiro Honda. As a result Ferdinand Alexander Porsche and Ferdinand Piech left the company and continued independently. Ferdinand Alexander Porsche started Porsche Designs which started producing executive Porsche merchandises like watches, shades furniture and other fashion related items. Meanwhile Ferdinand Piech formed new engineering and luxury items beauro and built one five cylinder inline diesel engine for Mercedes Benz, the other German giant.

The First CEO of Porsche AG was Ernst Furhmann and he was so adventurous that he tried to knock off the 911, which had gained popularity by then, from production and replace it with front engined Grand Sportswagen, the Porsche 928. But 911 had such long and powerful lifeline that it undoubtedly outlived the 928. Also Furhmann was the creator of the Furhmann engine which was used in the 365 Carrera and 550 Spyder. The main character that made this engine distinctive from other Porsche engines was that this had four overhead cam shafts apart from the normal central camshaft with push-rod system from Volkswagen. After the adventurous Furhmann there were Peter W Schultz, Arno Bohn and Wendelin Wiedking as the CEOs. The current chief executive officer of the company is Oliver Blume who is in charge from 2015. Meanwhile on the other side, Ferdinand Piech took over the CEO position of Volkswagen group from 1993 and he continued until 2002, and after resigning in 2002 he became the chairman of VAG supervisory board and is continuing since then.

Taking the story back to 1964, the year saw the introduction of one of the most to be iconic model, the Porsche 911. 911 had the pedigree of the combination of Porsche masterpiece, the air cooled rear engined sports car design. This was given something really punchy under the hood too, the iconic Porsche six cylinder boxer engine and this little but big beast was born from the hand of Ferdinand Alexander Porsche. 911 was chronological name given to the model but it later became so popular to the public that it turned to a brand of itself. The number was initially supposed to be 901 but Peugeot, the French automakers, already had that, which made the Porsche one to be 911. Along with 911 there where two other models Cayenne and boxter which were introduced later in the timeline and they had their own period on the story.

By 2002 Porsche had grown comparatively bigger and their new contestant, the Porsche Cayenne Marked the launch of their Leipzig production facility in Saxony state. Within two years of introduction of the new factory, it turned to be the hub of Porsche production as it accounted for more than half of the output from them, also the Leipzig facility produced the un-tamable beast, the Porsche Carrera GT. At its time the Porsche Carrera GT was one of the most expensive builds with a whupping 450,000 pounds price tag, and it turned out to be the most expensive production model they have ever built.

Within the next four years the Boxter and Cayenne supremacy came to an end and the 911 regained the throne of best seller. But the Cayenne still made a challenge for the 911 and since then both the models have been cycling the bestseller throne simultaneously. Porsche's north American wing, Porsche Cars North America announce the new scheme of subscribing to cars and SUVs, recently made into effect by one of the other German Automaker BMW. But this is different from that of BMW. The Porsche scheme allows the costumer to experience Porsche vehicles through subscription rather than owning or leasing the car. Yeah they have taken the literal meaning of it.

By the introduction of a new and unwelcomed player called the covid 19 Porsche took hit right at the head. They had to seize their production operations of Europe of almost two weeks, and by this deed they meant response to the significant growth in the rate of infection and death due to the COVID 19 and the resultant responsive measures by related authorities. Since their fallback they are slowly getting up back to the game with some significant announcements and refreshments in the model ranges.

Ferdinand Porsche on his initial stages, worked for Volkswagen and then turned out with his independent firm called the Porsche Automobiles. As said earlier it was Ferdinand Porsche who designed the Volkswagen Beetle or the peoples car. From the early stages, Porsche had kept a close relationship with Volkswagen as a company and later as a group. They had lended many parts to each other for both of their models. The first collaboration between them happened in 1969 resulting in the making of the VW-Porsche 914 and 914-6. Where 914 used the VW package under the hood and 914-6 used Porsche package under the hood. 7 years after the first one they came together again, in 1976, to make another model, the 912-E. For the states, that is the United States Of America they made a special model called the 924 which saw extensive use of parts from Audi, another German manufacturer, and to add to that fact, the car was rolled out to production from the Audi factory at Neckarslum. There was another model built in the same factory but used less VW components, the Porsche 944S. After getting under the same umbrella of collaboration many of the Porsche models began sharing platforms with other VW and Audi models. One of the most iconic model of Porsche, the cayenne SUV, built in the VW groups factory at Bratislava Slovakia, shares the underpinnings with VW Tuareg and Audi Q7.

By the year 2007 Porsche created a wing with the name Porsche SE by renaming the old Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, and became a holding company for the families' stake in Porsche Zwischenholding GmbH, which is about 50.1% which in turn held 100% of the old Porsche AG and Volkswagen AG 50.7% At the same time, the new Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG was created for the car manufacturing business. After two years, Porsche SE and VW AG decided to merge under the VAG group by 2011. This resulted in the formation of the Integrated Automobile group, also 50.76% shares of Volkswagen went to the hands of Porsche SE. Meanwhile Volkswagen AG acquired Porsche AG along with the management positions in Porsche SE. The highest stake of a company owned by Porsche is 81.8% that of Mieschke Hofmann und Partner a global information and technology and process consultancy on automotive and manufacturing sectors based from Ludwigsburg Germany. Also it has a 10% minority share on Bugatti Rimac, the Croatian automaker.

Porsche, in the long years of making cars has rolled out some of the most iconic models of all time. It is a tough job to select some of the iconic models from this vast range which shrank over time. But as Tony Stark said even dead I am the hero, some of these cars, which are already gone off from production, still lives down in the heart of enthusiasts, the real evergreen makes.

First is the Porsche 918 Spyder is a limited-production mid-engine plug-in hybrid Hyper-car manufactured by Porsche. The 918 Spyder is packed in the powerhouse of naturally aspirated 4.6 L, 4,593 cc V8 engine churning out 599 hp at 8,700 RPM, with two electric motors delivering an extra juice of 282 hp for a combined output of 875 horses and 1,280 N⋅m of torque. This 918 spyder is one of the rarest Porsche like that of the Carrera GT. The epic version of this car is when it comes in that Liquid Silver Finish with the acid green accents on both the inside and the outside. This is a one of a kind build, and that makes it an icon.

The Second one is the 911, the most popular model from the company. The Porsche 911 is a two-door 2 2 high performance rear-engined sports car, with all due Porsche traits introduced in September 1964. It packs the punch of signature Porsche flat-six engine which was air cooled until the 996 series made in 1998, and originally a torsion bar suspension. The car has been continuously undergone performance and visual enhancements through the years but the basic concept has remained unchanged. The 911 is in a way the gem of racing teams and drivers. As I said earlier 911 is well experienced in many motor-sport events and even small races and it has ran through almost every track around the world which makes It one among the most successful competition cars. In the mid-1970s, the naturally aspirated 911 Carrera RSR won world championship races including Targa Florio and the 24 Hours of Daytona. The 911-derived 935 turbo also won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979. Porsche won the World Championship for Makes in 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1979 with 911-derived models.

Now coming to the big muscly guys, the Porsche Cayenne marked the entry of Porsche to the big boys stuff or the SUV market. The Porsche Cayenne is a series of mid-size luxury crossover sport utility vehicles and it is on the field since 2002, with North American chapter of the model beginning in 2003. It is the first V8-engined vehicle built by Porsche since 1995, when the Porsche 928 was discontinued. It is also Porsche's first off-road variant vehicle since its Super and Junior tractors of the 1950s, and the first Porsche with four doors.The Cayenne is the first Porsche assembled outside of Europe, in Kulim, Kedah, Malaysia. Only the base model 3 liter V6 is assembled in Malaysia, while other models are imported from Slovakia. Andd the other brother, the Porsche Macan, The Porsche Macan code-named, the Type 95B is a high-performance five-door luxury crossover SUV rolled out from the production line in Porsche's Leipzig facility, Germany. The Macan range includes numerous variants and limited editions, including the Macan, Macan S, Macan S Diesel, Macan GTS and the Macan Turbo. The Macan shares a platform with the Audi Q5, also, is the least expensive vehicle currently sold by Porsche, so if you re looking for a Porsche, this could be a better choice without breaking the bank.

Porsche also has a junior car in their line up but do not underestimate that junior guy, he is a powerhouse. This car is known in two iterations, the Boxter and Cayman. These two are mid-engine two-seater sports cars from Porsche running across four generations and still going, as a two-door, two-seater roadster in the name Boxster and a three-door, two-seater fastback coupe called Cayman. The first generation Boxster was introduced in 1996; the second generation Boxster and the Cayman arrived in late 2005; and the third generation launched in 2012. Since the introduction of the fourth generation in 2016, the two models have been marketed as the Porsche 718 Boxster and Porsche 718 Cayman.

One of the most wild Porsche boy they have ever built is the Porsche Carrera GT, yeah the car mostly infamous for causing the death of the Hollywood legend, the king of Fast Saga, Paul Walker. Carrera GT with the project Code 980 is a mid-engine sports car who is an active player from 2004 to 2006. This car turned out to be an award magnet as it took a tonne of awards of its time. Sports Car International named the Carrera GT number one on its list of Top Sports Cars of the 2000s, and number eight on its Top Sports Cars of All Time list. For its advanced technology and development of its chassis, Popular Science magazine awarded it the "Best of What's New" award in 2003.

Yes and now talking about their legacy in motor-sports one of the biggest thing they can bluff about is their 19 outright wins at the 24 hours of Le Mans and is currently the worlds largest sports car manufacturer. In 2006 they built 195 race cars in various international motor-sports events. The next year Porsche was expected to construct no fewer than 275 dedicated race cars. Some of their prominent models they made during the year are 7 RS Spyder LMP2 prototypes, 37 GT2 spec 911 GT3-RSRs, and 231 911 GT3 Cup vehicles etc. Now there are roumers around the paddock that Porsche and Red-Bull Racing officials are talking about bringing the guys from Stuttgart to the F1 paddock but there is no official conformation or announcement related to the deal.

Now that you have read all these stuff let me sum up a little bit about the company. Headquarters and main factory in Zuffenhasen Stuttgart Germany, the place home to the iconic Porsche engines Flat Six and V8s. Meanwhile Cayenne and Panamera are produced in Leipzig Germany. By the 11th may of 2017 they produced one millionth Porsche 911, and for the celebrations they made a special edition candy, an Irish Green Carrera S. Four years later in the 21st of August 2021, they confirmed new plant in Malaysia, the very first one outside Europe. As the report goes the factory will be controlled by their Malaysian partner Sime Darby who has been the official distributor of the company from Stuttgart for almost the last 12 years. Even now Porsche is just improving themselves to be the best sports car maker in the world.

Maserati; A Different Italian Flavor!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 18:43:00 +0000

Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pasta, the most dominating words that you can hear when you ask about the country Italy. Yes Italy is the home to many of the fast cars and mouth watering dishes, Italian cars and cuisine are some of the most exotic things that you can get around the globe. But if take a closer look there are other car manufacturers, than that of Ferrari and Lamborghini, who focuses on speed and power rather than comfort and practicality. But wait, there are other manufacturers too, who focuses on maybe kind of both luxury comfort and performance, just like that of the Germans, but the fact is that they are shadowed by the dominance of the bulls and prancing horses. Yes today let us discuss about the car with the three spears, another automaker from the land of pizza, the Maserati Automobili. Now talking about the vast history and the current position of the company will take a long time and will bore you so lets talk it through the main highlights.

The vast and eventful book of the Italian automaker got kick started from the early 1900, to be more accurate from the first December of 1914, The Maserati Brothers, Alfieri, Bindo Ettore and Ernesto planned to pile up their knowledge in car making and start making some cars. Something that they had, to be called as an experience was that for the three of them. Alfieri, Bindo, Ernesto used to build 2L GP cars for Diatto, an Italian automaker. They planned to add their brother Ettore after they were fired from Diatto as a result of the factory clampdown. This event which lead to the creation of the company took place in 1926. Initially they were in the search of a logo which were their primary concern. Finally they agreed to choose a logo based on the Fountain of Neptune, accepting a suggestion from their family friend Marquis Diego de Sterlich. For the Italians the symbol of Neptune meant strength and vigor, also it symbolized the hometown of Maserati. Tragedy struck the Maserati brothers for the first time in 1932 when Alfieri died, but the rest of the brothers kept the firm running until after five years when they transferred the ownership to Alfodo Orisi. Three years went by without much notable highlights but in 1940 the company saw the first wave of change incoming when Orsi relocated the company headquarters to their hometown, Modena

Things were going as smooth as it could be until when the call for the World War 2 came. The call for WW2 forced the company to swap production. They had to reorganize the facility to make weapons and they were forced to abandon automotive manufacturing. But after a while when the dust of the war was cleared Maserati came back with their cars. Their first pre war model was the Maserati A6 series, and the post war period turned out to be one of the biggest turning points in the entire history of Maserati. Alberto Massimino, a fiat engineer with some italian pedigree from Alfa Romeo and Ferrari joined the team Maserati, some more talented engineers who were capable of working out magic like Giulio Alfeiri, Vittoro Bellentani, Giacchio Colombo followed Alberto to Maserati. Alberto, with the team focused on making the best engines and chassis, the most important and influential part of a car. With the team, the company began tasting the champagne of success and one of their most successful models were the A6GCS. These models saw the Maserati brothers giving out their last contributions to the company, the brothers made their last contributions to the models like 4CLT, 8CLT, A6 series etc.

But after almost 30 years of collaboration Alfodo Osiri transferred the ownership to the famous french company the Citroen Automotive. Event though the ownership was given, Alfodo remained as the nominal president of Maserati, but the company was controlled by the new owner and the joint venture was made public on the January of 1968. The joint venture was in favor for both companies in many ways, while Maserati tasted the essence of the french tech from Citroen for their models, Citroen made use of the powerful and exotic Italian engines from Maserati. And the first Citroen model having the Italian powerhouse rolled out of the assembly line in 1970 in the name of Citroen SM, an essential front wheel drive coupe, which came packed with the Maserati V6 and gearbox. SM shared the underpinnings with some of the rally racing icons like the Citroen DS and many more. Meanwhile on the other side Maserati made use of the french experts in hydraulic suspension, and their first model under the Citroen ownership was the Maserati Indy, a four seater fast back Grand tourer, packing the traditional V8 drivetrain which rolled out in 1969, and that was just a start of what followed, a total of 1.1K Indys rolled out of the assembly in the following years. 1971 saw Maserati taking the cover of their first mid-engined series production model, the Bora, which is essentially the first road legal Maserati to be made. Maserati made the 4 door version of the Citroen SM as the Quatteroporte II. But only a dozen of those cars were made and those who were made came with the Maserati V6 and took the front wheel drive mid engined layout and 6 headlight arrangement from the SM.

But then the Italian marquee saw one of the violent storms hitting them right in the head, which was in the form of 1973 oil crisis. The oil crisis put the breaks to the ambitious and fast pace expansion of the company which turned out to be a big backlash for them. The high price for fuel made the public rethink about their choice of cars to cope up with the newly arisen living financial conditions. The popularity for the fuel hungry sports car with big fat block engines went down very fast which affected every super-car manufacturers. Following the lead of the fuel crisis then came the financial black hole which took down Citroen in the form of bankruptcy. This made the guys at the headquarters think about the new allegation which lead to the formation of Peugeot Citroen Allegation or the PSA group. But that did not go as planned and in 1975 Citroen put up Maserati into liquidation. As the news spread around it created havoc and commotion and the work force picketed the factory. And the liquidation was suspended by the PSA group after they received a request from the Italian government. But the fact was that even under all these chaos and commotion the production was not interrupted and the factory was fully functional.

By the august of 1975, according to the agreement made with the Italian government which lead to the halt of the liquidation, Citroen passed the properties of Maserati to an Argentinian industrialist and former racing driver Alejandro De Tomaso, who later became the president and CEO of the Italian automobile marquee. The very first thing De Tomaso did was kicking off Alfieri form his position on the company and Tomaso did it on the very first day if taking his charge. After a while when all these financial commotions and the transfer of ownership chaos came to an end Maserati began producing fresh batches of cars under the leadership of De Tomaso. And the specialty of the new models was that it shared underpinnings with the De Tomaso models which was not at all surprising thing. But the fact was that the new owners were not able to create the highly anticipated bang on numbers. Even though it was not as massive as expected however it was able to create its won impact on the big life story of Maserati. Under De Tomaso Maserati made a big gamble by abandoning mid engined sports cars and front engined rear wheel drive cars replaced them on the charts. They replaced the iconic V8s with twin turbo V6 which lead to the creation of the bi-turbo family.

At 1984 Chrysler bought 5% share on Maserati which was the first step towards the joint venture which took place after a short while. As a result of the Maserati Chrysler merging the new models came out with a Chrysler touch. For example they renewed the ageing Quattroporte and reintroduced it as the Royale, with some serious bits of luxury just like the name suggests. But the bi-turbo era didnt last so long and it was wrapped up in 1990. And when it was gone they took down every single bit of the era. When the Bi-Turbo bid farewell to the market it took with it the legendary Maserati V8 which is the Maserati quad cam V8 and the name bi-turbo was dropped altogether. T he last Bi-Turbo coupe was called racing and it was practically a test mule for the new kid on the block, the iconic Maserati Ghibli. The Racing bi-turbo coupe tested many features which were to be loaded to the Ghibli. The year 1989 saw De Tomaso and Fiat making deals which when made became one of the iconic hand shakes of the history. In the December of 1989 Fiat says hello to the Italian automaker and the rest was history. This collaboration gave way to the introduction of some of the iconic models like Brachetta. After a short while De Tomaso packed the bags and left the group leaving Fiat and Maserati alone. When he left, De Tomaso sold about 51% stakes to Fiat auto group and in 1994 the Italian company rolled out their first model under the new leadership of Fiat. The new model was the latest generation of the Quatteroporte, the Quatteroporte IV. In the new update it packed some bi-turbo underpinnings and Gadini styling and the V6 from the Ghibli II was packed under the hood. After acquiring 51% shares from De Tomaso, Fiat purchased Maserati from Chrysler which put a n end to the short term partnership from Chrysler and Maserati.

In the July of 1997, Fiat sold 50% of the share, that is 1% less than that of what they got from De Tomaso, to the most iconic rivals of Maserati from their own home town, Ferrari. Two years flew by and in 1999, under the leadership of Fiat, Ferrari took the full control of the Italian automakers and as a result there were a few things happening around. The transition was pretty calm and quiet because there was nothing to be bluffed about as both companies were under the same umbrella. What Ferrari did for the first time was replacing the then outdated 1940s factory with a something new which made all the change with all the new age technology and equipments. With all the new facilities, tech and equipment, the company was ready to rock and roll again. All these changes brought out a fresh and improvised Quatteroporte to the market and the new one has a name added to the tail, something that is common with the new age Ferrari's. The revamped Quatteroporte was named as Quatteroporte Evoluzone. 1998 can be classified among one of the warm years as per the Maserati history because, a new chapter has began on the vast book of Maserati from 1998. It was when the company rolled out their two door coupe with a twin turbo V8 under the hood in the name of Maserati 3200 GT. And within four years the last links to De Tomaso broke, that was in 2002. It was when the 3200 GT got successors in the names Maserati Coupe and Spyder. Both had the naturally aspirated Dry Sump 4.2L V8 paired with a trans axle gearbox. Later the day both of these Coupe and Spyder Got replaced with th Grand Turesmo and Grand Cabrio respectively. By 2001 Ferrari refurnished and refreshed their production house at Modena and gave it the new generation and high tech devices and equipment. After refreshing the production house at their home, Maserati went to the States, the fact was that, what they wanted to do was just initiate the programs at the states and every thing followed was massive for the company. The demand for the Tradient badge cars skyrocketed and within a short period of time they ruled the market of their home.

The year 2005 saw the two home grown rivals break up, Ferrari and Maserati broke up and parted ways with. When Ferrari broke up, Maserati went on a date with another Italian automaker with the name Alfa Romeo who was under the same group of Fiat. Since both the groups were under the same umbrella, all the transaction and the allegations were under the control of Fiat group just like in the case of Ferrari allegation. Under the new allegation Maserati resumed production with a new spirit and by the first week of June 2005, they rolled out their 20,000th car, a Quatteroporte VI rolled out of the assembly line. Two years of their restless hard work made the results and in 2007 Maserati made their first profit after a massive gap of a decade and 7 years under the leadership of Fiat group. In 2010 Fiat made an official announcement that they have created a new brand groups for the brands under them, it was specifically fir the three companies, Maserati, Alfa Romeo and their own performance wing, the Abarth Group. But within a while Abarth left the chat and went back under the parent company laving Maserati and Alfa Romeo in the group. Even though Alfa and Maserati were under the same umbrella they stayed different and had their own identity among the group. This was made clear by the statement from the leader of the pack Weseter. He quoted that Alfa Romeo and Maserati were different and Alfa is the latter better integrated with Fiat. He made it clear for the fact that alfa romeo will not share any parts with Maserati. After the dust of this incident cleared up Maserati began their own independent expansion and increase in production. The flagship of the Maserati pack was the Quatteroporte VI followed by the introduction of Ghibli. This two models locked horns with the German veterans of the game, Mercedes Benz and BMW.

By the spirit of expansion, Maserati revisited their long gone nostalgia, the high performance field. With their re entry they planned to fight with the German veterans BMW-M and Mercedes-AMG. What they did was pack their flagship models, the Quatteroporte VI, Levante and Ghibli with the V8s churning out 526 HP and an All Wheel Drive, which made the rivals rethink about their models capabilities. From 2013 the graph and every other things began turning in favor of the Italian automaker. Sales graph began moving up and it was just like the rapid acceleration from a Tesla model S Plaid it just rocketed up to the top. In that year they rolled out 15400 units from the assembly line which is 6000 units from that of the previous year. And the next year they rolled about double the times the units they did last year recording as high as 36500 Maserati cars running around the globe. The year they recorded a Herculean increase in their sale, about 136% from that of 2013. From an analysis the officials of Maserati found that the best soil for them to flourish was the American soil as they topped the production charts on the States. From then until now they are growing up and above with wide variety of models in the lineup.

During the first quarter of 2022 Maserati has produced an announcement that they are planning to produce an electric alternative for all the models existing in their lineup hence constituting their part to the global energy crisis and fuel shortage. They said by the report that this mission is planned to be completed by 2025, they also said that there will be a separate wing for their electric vehicle segment called the foglore which when spoken in Italian means Lightning. I am a bit suspicious about that name, yeah something is fishy.

Now lets just go through some of the iconic Maserati models which rolled out of the assembly line with a bang. The Current lineup of the Italian automaker comprises of two SUV's within which one is a coupe, one luxury sedan, one sports sedan and one super sports car and its roofless sibling. The first and the foremost comes the Quatteroporte, one of the eldest player of the game. The Quatteroporte was a four door luxury sedan from the Italian house and the name, when said in the mother tongue, translates to four doors, yes the name means simply four doors. The Quatteroporte played a long game on the field with its generations stretching from the first to number six. The very first one or the great ancestor rolled out of the factory back in 1963, the assembly took place at the Modena facility in the hometown, Italy. The latest generation, the 6th one started production from 2013.

The second model is the Maserati Ghibli, a sports executive saloon which locked horns with the Germans, BMW M5, Mercedes E Class and Audi A6. The Ghibli broke the cover at the 2013 Shanghai motor-show. The same year, officials waved green flags for the production and the production got underway later that year, and, is not until now given the chequered flag. The Ghibli underpins the Maserati M-150 platform and under the hood it was given two banging packages, V6 and V8 engines on different variants. The funny fact was that the base model, which was supposed to be just the body, frame and chassis turned out to be packed with a punch of 330 horses. Talking about some power figures, by 2018 Ghibli was given 20 more horses. The birthplace of Ghibli is another town in Italy called Turin, the facility of Turin was where the assembly of Ghibli took place.

Now comes the Maserati Levante, a mid size cross over SUV with added bits and pieces of luxury and comfort. The Maserati Levante was introduced to the automotive world in 2014. Before getting introduced, this model, the Levante was highly anticipated after the introduction of Maserati Kubang SUV Concept which was taken cover off at the 2003 Frankfurt motor-show and was showcased again at the 2011. after three years in 2014 the officials waved green flag for production works to get going. Getting put into order in the Mirafiori plant of Turin, Italy. The car was named after the warm easterly wind that constantly visits the western Mediterranean sea. Under the hood, this thing had a V6 spitting out either 350 or 425 hp according to the state of tunes.

Next on the line is the twins from the lineup, the Maserati Grand Cabrio and Grand Turesmo. Even with two different surnames, the grand cabrio and grand turesmo are essentially one and the same car but the only difference that made both cars significant is that one has a fixed roof and the other has a removable roof. Both packs the 4.7 V8 under the hood churning out 454 horses and underpins the Maserati M139 platform. The Grand Turesmo is, as the name suggests a grand tourer introduced to the world in 2007 and was on production from 2017 till 2019.

For us the next contestant in line is the Maserati MC 20. As the name says, the MC 20 is another two door mid-engined super sports car made form the Italian soil. The MC 20 broke the cover in 2020. It featured a carbon fibre moncoque chassis and by introduction the company also announced the fully calibrated sports variant of the MC 20 which is yet to come, but there was something new that was introduced in the name of Maserati Celio, a drop top version of the Maserati MC 20 which had something more of a luxury touches. apart from featuring a Carbon fibre monocoque chassis, the MC 20 packed the punch of almost 620 horses from a 3 liter V6. Something that can be considered as an exotic and expensive package.

Legacy on the Motorsports is something that the tradiant marquee can always brag about. The Maserati Automobili was an active participant in all the Motorsports racing forms ranging from the great daddy, Formula 1 to Touring championships. Through the long time participation Maserati was able to present to the world some notable drivers like Juan Manual Fangio, the five time world champion and Prince Bira of Siam. Throughout the years in Motorsports, Maserati developed 15 GT race-cars for several series like the European Cup and naturel endurance series.

Now comes one of the most relevant topic that is a question any where and everywhere nowadays, will this company do anything in favor of the environmentalists. As the report goes, the answer for the question turns out to be yes and they will be coming up with some of the out of the world concepts and many of the electrified versions of their models in the current lineup, which is something that I have mentioned earlier. Lets keep our fingers crossed and wait for each one to arrive to the field. Maserati, even though grown under the shadow of famous Italian automakers like Lamborghini and Ferrari, is now a brand with its own signature in the automotive industry.

Huracan STO; The Track-born!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 14:04:00 +0000

I have written a lot about the Italian automaker, the home of naturally aspirated V10, V12 monsters, Automobili Lamborghini. So I think there is no need of an introduction to what we are gonna hear from the hosts today. Yes it is about a track monster who has came some time ago with the technology from space age to grind itself and get the taste of the regular asphalt, the Car "Based on True Story", as said by the officials. Lets hear it from them.

Hello there Jade! how are you mate. Hai Eric!, man its been a while so do you have something interesting today?. Yes pretty much yes The Lamborghini Huracan STO, I have been admiring about the beauty and the beast in one piece of artwork and they have done massive job in caging both traits to one carbon fibre aluminum chassis. Yes mate, yes you can always say that, appreciate their effort man such a lovely car it is. Basically this is a track version of the road car Lamborghini Huracan. The Huracan is such an amazing car that is named from the character of the car. It is powerful, playable and good looking. The name Huracan, which is the Spanish name for hurricane is just another amazing creation from the house of Lamborghini. It touched the asphalt from the second quarter of 2014. Yes man I remember seeing it on the 2014 Geneva auto-show for the first time. Ya man that was the first time they broke the cover of the car for the first time. It then was a mid engine sports car, the first one of the car was the Huracan LP 610-4. Which clearly said that the powerhouse of the car was placed longitudinally. The Longituedinale Prosteriore says it all man. Ahh yes and they have given it an extraordinary iteration, and in that they have take the car from the track, or the track legal car and mixed it with the road version of the car. Yes man and they have made it so interesting that, this car now have both the traits of the road car and the track car, yeah mighty but yet tamable on the roads, that is what the Huracan Super Trofeo Omologate is. Man they have added some sick packages to the STO edition and this thing is just a beast of it.

That addition is clearly visible on the car from the first sight man, the very first thing that you can see is the overall new shape of the car and for the first sight the hood is housing two massive air ducts which is there for the continuous air flow and another main reason is to get massive amount of down-force. There are other elements like the front wing rear wing and sharp cuts and creases which let the car cut air more easily. Moreover there are lots of air curtains, gills on the wheel arches and a massive roof scoop which makes the car looks like a shark with a massive fin on the top. All these factors makes the car more aerodynamic and subtle to look at. More like a sophisticated track machine. One of the main factor on the hood which gives the car an aggressive appeal is the signature headlamps, the way it is placed gives the car the face of an angry bull. There are air dams and a lot of elements to help the nose cut air more smoothly.

On the sides man, the main spot of attraction is the wheel arches, apart from housing 20 inch wheels the wheel arches are home to some carbon fibre finished gills which improves the airflow on the sides. Apart from the contrasting finish of the gills and side-skirts. The whole side profile have lots of sharp character lines cuts and creases which makes the side profile pretty sophisticated but the streamlined kind of shape also makes it more aerodynamic. The wing mirrors and the door handles are the other two things which makes some contrasting accents on the side profile. The shoulder line have sharp veins and creases which reaches the hip portion giving way to more air vents. One of the most standing out thing in the side profile is the shoes this car has put in. The matte black forged Hek mono-lock iconic Lamborghini wheels makes it a deadly combo with the bridgestone potenza race tyres, they have also given one silver and one diamond finished Hek Mono-lock pattern alloys and a Magnesium forged multi spoke alloy with a bronze finish. Also this car is given CCMR carbon ceramic breaks which as they say are derived from the formula 1 technology. The wheels on either sides are given the same size not like the ones you have seen in Aventador or others.

The rear end is clearly as sophisticated as that of the others. The signature Lamborghini style has been followed in the rear which makes the rear end so 'busy'. The main attraction on the rear end is the massive wing which is emerging from the engine cover. This massive dual plated rear wing helps the driver to hold the rear end in position and to throw it out as per his choice. The rear wing is another addition of aerodynamics which helps the rear to stick on to the road. There is a combination of gloss black and orange finish throughout the rear end and on the roof scoop is where the elements stand out. The rear end is filled with the regular Lamborghini things, the Lamborghini logo and the signature octagonal grill with the name "STO" sculpted out on it. Under the body there is a massive carbon fibre finished diffuser placed which again helps the airflow of the car. From the outside as I said earlier man this looks just meaty, and beastly, a car truly from the tracks.

This car looks as subtle on the inside as it looks on the outside man. Yes the interior is dipped in black and is available with either bucket seats or racing seats. One of the main features which makes this, or to be real any Lamborghini so talkative is the way the interior is put together and the way they have added the color accents. Well but the interior feels very much carbon fibre which is giving it a GT3 touring car feel. The fact about the interior is that there is nothing much to talk about the interior of the STO because there is everything that you can see or that you expect to be in is there, the hexagonal AC vents, Lamborghini developed infotainment system which absolutely every type of data needed for a track day car. The stitching and piping of the interior is finished in orange and blue finish, also it is given the Lamborghini signature alcantara leather inserts all around and in the steering wheel. Going on with some broucher information, this car is having three driving modes, which is not a new thing, the STO, Pioggia and Trofeo. As the broucher says, the Pioggia mode is good for track use in wet and slippery conditions, Trofeo for dry track conditions and STO for the ultimate street driving experience in any conditions. This three modes are more secured with Lamborghini Integrated Vehicles Dynamics tech which adjust the damping and other elements which play crucial part in assuring immersed driving experience.

Talking some numbers this thing has some serious power under the hood, with the 5.2L signature naturally aspirated V10 under the hood which churns out 631 HP and 565 NM and delivers it altogether to the rear wheels. The rear wheels then with the help of another iconic 7 speed dual clutch automatic gearbox pulls to the 0-100 mark in 3 seconds dead. The breaking duties are done by carbon ceramic front and rear breaks and the car is held together by the carbon fibre chassis. At the end of the day this beast which has the track pedigree more than it should have, but that is the main factor which makes the car so exclusive on the roads.

Taycan Turbo S: Car looking EV!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 07:39:00 +0000

Porsche, the guys from Stuttgart is pretty much famous for their flamboyant raw power machines, with the classic Porsche look, minimal design and maximum performance, which are their signatures in the industry. Now raises a possibility, how will it be if all these Porsche traits come together in an EV? Well Porsche has answered this question a couple of years back with the introduction of Taycan, their stepping stone to the electric car platform. As time flied Porsche introduced many more models to the Taycan line-up like the Taycan 4S, GTS,Turbo and Turbo S. Apart from the new models, they also introduced two new body styles, the Sport and Cross Turismo versions. But as it turns out, keeping things simple the new body style is pretty much the estate version as far as I am concerned. Now today, our hosts are having a little chat about the variant with stupendous acceleration, the Taycan Turbo S.

So Jade, speaking of all these EVs, I think the conventional EV styling is pretty dump many of the times. Yes man I felt so many of the times too, even with the Teslas, and Lucids with power and comfort hanging over the top, they are pretty much designed in some kind of space ship designs. Even when Merc, Audi and other companies came to the EV market with their contestants, they too lacked something. If you ask Me what it is, I can say that it is the look of a regular car and the conventional styling. But Eric time moves on and improvements and innovations happen. Uhhh you can say that, but as a petrol-head what makes me walk away from EVs is the design. Ahh but you will gradually be familiar with the new philosophy mate. Yes but about three years back I saw something on the TV that checked all my boxes, pretty conventional, powerful and comfortable. Let me guess that man... Well as far as I can think, that would be a Porsche Taycan.

Mate this is the Porsche Taycan, but with a Turbo S on the tail. Ooh the other one with some G forces to experience due to the monstrous torque as you accelerate from 0-100 huh?. Yes that is one of the highlight of Taycan Turbo S. Yes mate that is pretty much what everyone expects because the name says it all, the word "Turbo S" given to a car without turbo does two things, one, it says the car is incredibly fast and two it could make you believe that it has turbos. Man but people other than you have the common sense not to mistake of an EV having turbos. Yeah, whatever but there is something interesting on this car which has replaced the turbos because it is an EV. What is that? Well as it turns out, this car have two gears, one in the front and one in the rear. Aahaa so that is the reason that this car makes you feel sick if you launch it for 10-20 times continuously huh? Yes mate exactly, as this car have two gars, the amount of torque delivered during the launch is massive and it can be experienced by the drivers. Ohh my god that would be such an experience.

Talking some numbers, this thing has two motors on the front and rear axles packing a total punch of 750 horses and 1043 newton meter torque, and this can thus hit 0-100 in Which is a reason why this thing is really absurd on the case of numbers, without any other spec, the stock car costs about 139K quid, it varies according to the way you spec it. High on power and high on price, but at the end of the day this is an EV with a Porsche badge on it. But look Jade a Tesla costs you about 100K less and plus it has more range and well established charging stations, which could get you out from charge anxiety, but with this thing on your hand you probably will have to consult a psychologist for anxiety after you complete a road-trip on this thing, because it only has about 309 Km range in single charge which is man above the half than that of a Tesla. Whatever it may be I like this thing, and the fact we both agree on is that this looks like a car, a conventional real car, not the space ship of a Tesla. Hmm well that is a fact mate!.

Now how it looks man?, I think looks are one thing which makes you spend 100K more on this rather than a Tesla. From the way this looks, this is subtle and just simple, that's it. Yeah no sophistication, no complex lines or any other kind of design elements and that is the Porsche way of doing it. Yes the signature Porsche design has been carried out into here too. More or less this thing reminds me of the Panamera, maybe a modern Panamera kind of design but they have done it well. Yes from the front this has the signature Porsche looks, the plane and simple look. Mate they have given notable changes to the front end tho, the headlamps, which are matrix LEDs in kind of oval shape not the circular one, packed into this bulged out wheel arch extensions which give an appeal of the classic touch, they have changed it and added a small air curtain down the line of the headlamp, which is finished in black too. Down the front end on the lip of the car, there is a carbon fibre front splitter and all these black accents are incorporated nicely without making things dirty. On the front boot door, not the hood because it is an EV, there are two mild character lines and a Porsche logo completing the front end.

On the side, it is plane again but with a small air curtain near to the wheel arch and two mild character lines, one around the hip and the other around the bottom quarter. The massive glossy black finished pop out handle bars, and carbon fibre finished side skirts makes the car a little bit sportier too. Man you have missed the important highlight, the shoes, massive 21 inch wheels with Mission E design wheels with massive exposed calipers make it look more ecstatic, the black finish on the alloys complete the course. Look, the hip gets bulgier around the tail end which is an aerodynamic advantage, also it gives the car an extended coupe feel.

Man look at the rear end, it has followed the modern Porsche philosophy, with sleeker tail lamps, minimal design and sportiness packed all around. The diffuser, and the vents make the rear end more subtle and sporty. At the end of the day this feels like a modern Panamera that's it mate. Uhh that is the simple conclusion, the Porsche way!.

Now the interior. Yes the interior is a mix of both cool and dump stuff, but it is brought together beautifully and the overall ambiance is good. Mate let me say the dump stuff, it is in the gauge cluster, the gauge cluster has done beautifully, in a minimal, clear manner but they have given some rather useless information in the outer edge of the cluster, and I said rather useless because it is not visible in the driving position. What man? Yes now I got it, the steering wheel is hiding all that information, but other than that, well made dashboard and the sport chrono stopwatch instrument is an extra ornament to the dash. Even without that the dash looks pretty luxurious with the gloss black instrument cluster and golden accents given to it on the AC vents, the combo works well. Mate this golden accent can be seen all around the interior, like in the steering wheel cup holders , door handles and other ac vents.

The lower part of the dash and the seats are finished with Atacama beige and the contrasting black suits well in giving the luxury ambiance all around the interior. The centre console also have more screens around and some storage spaces along with a couple of cup holders. On the rear end we have a bit of compromised headroom because of the panoramic glass roof, also you can pay some extra money to get one more seat which will be pretty uncomfortable. Still as I said man, they had put this thing well. Yes completely perfect for a steady cruise but not for long drives tho. Well man, the fact is that this has the audio system worth around 6K and the signature Porsche 18 way adjustable seats. Well that will add up points and the fact is that we forgot about it. Hehe!

This car is really fast on the papers as well as on the road, elegant and beautiful minimal and at last a Car looking EV. Yes good for that but still Tesla have the upper hand bro!. But this is a Porsche man that logo makes you pay more and the range takes you to a psychologist. And On that Bombshell lets call it a day. Yes bro see-ya!.